We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional...

We provide empirical estimates of the risk-sharing and redistributive properties of the German federal from 1970 until 2006, with special attention to the effects of German fiscal system base unification. We find that tax revenue sharing between the states and the federal government and the...

We study the channels of interstate risk sharing in Germany for the time period 1970 to 2006 following the methodology of Asdrubali et al. (1996). Their framework allows us to estimate the degree of smoothing of a shock to a state's gross domestic product by factor markets, the government...

We provide empirical estimates of the risk-sharing and redistributive properties of the German federal fiscal system based on data from 1970 until 2006, with special attention to the effects of German unification. We find that tax revenue sharing between the states and the federal government and...

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe went from being largely closed to being largely open to international capital flows. This paper discusses their experience with capital account liberalization and coping with large capital inflows. We start with a discussion of basic economic...

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe went from being largely closed to being largely open to international capital flows. This paper discusses their experience with capital account liberalization and coping with large capital inflows. We start with a discussion of basic economic...

Fiscal rules, such as the excessive deficit procedure and the stability and growth pact (SGP), aim at constraining government behavior. Milesi-Ferretti (2003) develops a model in which governments circumvent such rules by reverting to creative accounting. The amount of this creative accounting...

By introducing a new measure of the banking systems' size, the paper challenges the existing consensus on severe underdevelopment of the CEE banking sectors. We argue that the existing studies on the size of CEE banking systems exaggerate the real degree of underdevelopment because common...