Reduced exchange rate volatility and higher and less heterogeneous quality of institutional rules and macroeconomic policies are two of the main (anticipated and concurring) effects expected from a currency union. In this paper we measure the magnitude of these two effects on the Euro area...

This paper studies the welfare impact of a common monetary policy in the context of a two-country, general equilibrium model with liquidity effect and nominal wage contracts, heterogeneous agents, imperfect competition in the labor market, trade in goods, immobility of labor and mobility of...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic implications of different regimes of international fiscal coordination and monetary-fiscal cooperation in a monetary union with independent fiscal authorities that act strategically vis a vis a common central bank. In the presence of other policy goals...

The Common European Asylum System calls for increased coordination of the EU countries' policies towards asylum seekers and refugees. In this paper, we provide a formal analysis of the effects of coordination, explicitly modelling the democratic process through which policy is determined. In a...

The numerous studies on preferences for redistribution in recent years offers a wealth of insights into the interactions between institutions and economic outcomes. In this paper I posit that labour market institutions can be and have been used to mitigate the regressive effects of market...

The decision of whether to release transgenic crops in the EU is one subject to flexibility, uncertainty, and irreversibility. We analyse the case of herbicide tolerant sugar beet and reassess whether the 1998 de facto moratorium of the EU on transgenic crops for sugar beet was correct from a...

This paper analyzes the economic impact of regional integration on agricultural trade. Using a simple Krugman-type model with tariff distortions, two propositions on the impact of regionalism on trade flows are derived: (i) the impact of regional integration is stronger, when the degree of...

In this article we analyse how the enlargement of a monetary union may affect the design of the common monetary policy when the latter transmits asymmetrically between the member countries. We find that the use of national information about inflation and unemployment in the design of the common...

Existing studies on the impact of the euro on goods trade report increments between 5% and 40%. These estimates are based on standard panel gravity models for the level of trade. We show that the residuals from these models exhibit upwards trends over time for the euro countries, and that this...

Using euro-area data, we re-examine the empirical success of New-Keynesian Phillips curves (NKPCs). We re-estimate with a suitably specified optimizing supply side (which attempts to treat non-stationarity in factor income shares and mark-ups) that allows us to derive estimates of technology...