Founded by the late Karl Brunner in 1970, the Konstanz Seminar celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1999. Brunner started the Seminar with two objectives, to close the gap in the quality of research and teaching of economics between the United States and Europe, Germany and Switzerland in...

An inflation and stabilization bias may arise as a result of the principal-agent nature of monetary policy. Both depend on the degree of political uncertainty and the type of relationship between central bankers and the incumbent political leaders. Specifically, our analysis indicates how a...

This paper discusses the strategic choices involved in the transformation of the current EMS into a European Monetary Union. Alternative strategy proposals are evaluated under the criteria of credibility, flexibility, effective institution-building and mitigation of end games. The Delors...

We study the channels of interstate risk sharing in Germany for the time period 1970 to 2006, estimating the degrees of smoothing of a shock to a state's gross domestic product by factor markets, the government sector, and credit markets, respectively. Within the government sector, we pay...

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

[fre] Cet article passe d’abord en revue les développements institutionnels ayant marqué le cadre budgétaire européen depuis le début des années 1990, en insistant sur les épisodes durant lesquels ce cadre a été remis en question par les pays membres de l’Union monétaire...

[fre] Le Traité de Maastricht sur l'Union Européenne comporte une Procédure des Déficits Excessifs limitant la liberté d'emprunter des gouvernements dans l'union monétaire européenne. Cette procédure a pour justification d'empêcher les États de sur-emprunter et de demander un...

Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the empirical patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries in the past two decades. This paper integrates these two...

We develop a two-country overlapping-generations model in which international capital flows mitigate two distinct distortions of financial frictions. Cross-country differences in financial development explain two recent empirical puzzles: first, financial capital flows from poor to rich...