A few years after the establishment of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), large asymmetries emerged in the trade balances and the current accounts of the member-states. A divide seems to separate two groups in the euro area, one with the northern countries achieving external...

We describe the political-economic environment that precipitated the Greek crisis. Involved were nocuous collaborations between private interests and the formally appointed custodians of the public interest, and a captured politicized bureaucracy. The confluence of these forces aided in the...

We estimate the effect of euro adoption on prices using data on Greek exporters spanning over the period 1999-2007. The overall impact of the euro on the prices of exports was negligible, but it masks significant heterogeneity across firms with different levels of pre-euro productivity. Our...