The paper investigates the empirical relevance of the negative financial spillovers hypothesis according to which fiscal imbalances in one EMU member country bid up the interest rate faced by all other participants in the currency union. This idea questions the ability of financial markets to...

This paper addresses the issue of whether and by how much public investment or public capital can enhance economic performance. In comparison with the literature on the subject, we apply many different methodologies to answer these questions. A VAR model (for France, Italy, Germany, the UK and...

How much risk sharing takes place between regions within countries, between countries internationally, and what are the lessons for EMU? We study these questions based on regional data from the US, Canada, the UK and Italy, and national data from an international sample of 23 OECD countries,...