We provide empirical estimates of the risksharing and redistributive properties of fiscal equalization among the states of the German federation. Fiscal equalization serves as a mechanism to insure state budgets against asymmetric revenue shocks, but provides almost no insurance against regional...

This paper provides an empirical investigation on the discrepancies between official exchange rate regimes and de facto exchange rate policies in transition economies. Since official and de facto regime choices are not independent of each other, we adopt a bivariate probit model to describe the...