This paper explores the dominant role of politics in decisions made by euro area governments during the crisis. Decisions that appear to have been driven by local political considerations to the detriment of the euro area as a whole are discussed. The domination of politics over economics has...

This paper investigates the impact of the euro on corporate valuations in Greece. Previous empirical results for the ten countries that founded the Monetary Union (EMU) uncovered various positive effects of the common currency. Greece who joined EMU later, coming from a weaker macroeconomic...

European monetary history prior to 1950 presents many attempts at international monetary coordination, but none were as bold and as far reaching as the European Monetary Union envisioned in the Delors Report of 1989 and enacted through the 1991 Treaty on the European Union in Maastricht. This...

We show the Portuguese transition to the euro, in the framework of political economics, by constructing a bivariate confidence index, based upon Rocha de Sousa (1998, 1999a,b, 2001). Besides we try to understand if the euro functioned as an instrument of politico-economic integration. The...

Widespread concern over real effects of EMU is consistent with new Keynesian approaches to macroeconomic fluctuations, but more difficult to reconcile with a real business cycle (RBC) paradigm. Using a model with frictions as a point of departure, I speculate that nominal price rigidity in...