We use a two-country monetary model with unionized labor markets and open-economy spillovers to study the macroeconomic consequences of the formation of a monetary union. It is shown that the monetary regime affects the trade-off between real consumer wages and employment faced by the unions....

Universal banks in transition economies can potentially impose a better corporate control structure on the firms, they can be sources of long-term finance, and they can contribute to real sector restructuring. At the same time, universal banking causes conflicts of interest which are...

Today, a variety of financial systems exists in Europe. In view of EMU the question then arises what kind of "institutional convergence" may be required to enable the future European System of Central Banks (ESCB) to function efficiently. With respect to payment systems and settlement assets the...

This paper explores coordination problems in the transition to European Monetary Union (EMU). If incentives to undertake costly convergence and the benefits of EMU to any individual countrydepend on other countries' strategies, innefficiencies and multiple equilibria can arise. A multi-speed...

The likely impact of the EMU on the variability and level of employment is analysed. The major conclusions are: (1) Although an inflation-target regime will constrain monetary policy of a non-participant in the EMU, it still leaves considerable scope for exchange-rate changes in the case of...

In recent years a number of countries have introduced currency boards (CB). The new generation currency boards, which is gaining swing and popularity, preserves to different degrees the central bank's ability to perform the lender of last resort function (LOLR) and leaves room for intervention...

We build a model of a fixed exchange rate regime with escape clauses and output persistence. In the spirit of the Asian crisis in 1997, persistence in our model arises from inability of the domestic financial institutions to intermediate international credit. Our main message is that since...

While the European Monetary Union (EMU) is now a real ity, debate among economists nonetheless continues about the design and desirability of monetary unions.Since an essential element of a monetary union is the delegation of monetary power to a single centralized entity, one of the key issues...

We study monetary policy under different central bank constitutions when the labor-market insiders set the nominal wage so that outsiders are involuntarily unemployed. If the insiders are in the majority, the representative insider will be the median voter. We show that an independent central...

It is argued that the history of the Australian Commonwealth Notes Issue Board over the period 1920-1924 is supportive of Friedman's contention that the possibility of a genuinely independent monetary authority is illusory. The Board was created as a genuinely independent monetary authority....