Germany’s political economy has undergone a substantial transformation. After having been held up as the “sick man of Europe” at the turn of the century, it is now considered, depending on the point of view, either an “economic superstar” or a bulky elephant in the European Economic...

Two recent proposals for overcoming the euro area crisis make the case for monetary financing of the public sector. Watt (2015) proposes that the ECB finances public investment directly, Pâris and Wyplosz (2014) contend that public debt may be effectively restructured by burying parts of it in...

We investigate the public-private wage differentials in ten euro area countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). To account for differences in employment characteristics between the two sectors, we focus on micro data taken from EU-SILC....