The paper studies the incentives to join a monetary union, and the incentives to reform within a monetary union and within the candidate countries, respectively. It presents some "orders of magnitude" evidence on the size and balance of the incentive effects for joining and being a member, and...

We use a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) analysis to explore the (spill-over) effects of fiscal policy shocks in Europe. To enhance comparability with the existing literature, we first analyse the effects of these shocks at the national level. Here, we employ identification based on Choleski...