Why might the European member states seek for Fiscal Union? Coordination, macro-stability purposes and provision of (European) public goods are certainly goals of paramount importance for the implementation of Fiscal Union at European level. However, there is an equally important component of...

This Working Paper examines options for the design of a workable fiscal union for the euro area. It provides a comparative study of fiscal institutions in the US and euro area in order to supply lessons from the operation of the US fiscal regime that could inform the design of the, hitherto...

Turmoil in euro area once more forces EU authorities to rethink future of further monetary integration. One of the most commonly used criterions for successful monetary in contemporary research is business cycle synchronization (BCS). Though BCS has been vastly described at country level, not as...

The aim of the 'Five Presidents Report' cited in the title acknowledges that an important driver of the European economic crisis has been the faulty original design of the Monetary Union, and that substantial steps are urgently needed towards the creation of truly supranational institutions. Yet...

With a view to establishing a Capital Markets Union (CMU), efforts to integrate (private) capital markets and private risk-sharing in the European Union are underway. However, the single (capital) market will be burdened by a perennial potential threat to sovereign bond market stability in the...