1) The Adoption of the Euro by New Member States: Challenges and Vulnerabilities by Michael C. Bonello 2) The Economics of Offshore Financial Services and the Choice of Tax, Currency, and Exchange-Rate Regimes by George M. von Furstenberg 3) Promoting Integration of European Retail Payment...

A sketch of the International Monetary Fund’s 70-year history reveals an institution that has reinvented itself over time along multiple dimensions. This history is primarily consistent with a “demand driven” theory of institutional change, as the needs of its clients and the type of...

Ownership of real estate through corporations in offshore tax havens creates opportunities for tax evasion and money laundering and may have undesirable effects in housing markets. In this paper, we study offshore ownership of real estate in the United Kingdom by combining several data sources:...

The enlargement of the European monetary union to include the accession countries (ACs) will not lead to higher average inflation in the enlarged euro area, but only to inflation redistribution across countries if continuity of the monetary policy framework is preserved. In the short term,...

This paper examines the welfare implications of a country joining a currency union as opposed to operating in a flexible exchange rate regime. At the country level, the suboptimal response to domestic and foreign shocks and the inability of setting inflation at the desired level may be offset by...

This paper examines the cross-dynamics of volatility term structures implied by foreign exchange options. The data used in the empirical analysis consist of daily observations of implied volatilities for OTC options on the euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Swiss franc, and Canadian dollar,...

This paper assesses the prospects for monetary integration between Emerging East Asian (EEA) economies. Our empirical analysis is based on a simple analytical framework for currency unions of small open economies, with a focus on the conduct of monetary policy in the presence of different types...

We examine the implications of monetary union for macroeconomic stabilisation in catching up participating countries. We allow member states’supply conditions to differ inside the union, especially with regard to sectoral characteristics. Sectoral productivity shocks on balance hamper the...

This paper analyses the impact of European Monetary Union on outside countries, with emphasis on countries of the Mediterranean Area (MED12). After discussing the possible "eurization" of bilateral trades between EMU countries and countries with close economic and geographical links; the...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is in the process of re-inventing itself with bilateral and multilateral surveillance emerging as a key function. The paper analyses how IMF surveillance announcements may be influenced by political power that member countries exert at the IMF. First, we...