The core objective of this paper is to determine the main political and economic conditions and challenges related to the possible evolution of the integration process in the euro area toward fiscal federalism and fiscal union as a way to increase the capacity of the area to cope with future...

Labor mobility is commonly taken as a property of an optimal currency area. But how does that property affect the outcome of fiscal policies? We address this issue with a two country - two period model, where both asymmetric and symmetric productivity shocks may hit the countries. We show that...

This thesis was written by Jakob Eberl while having been a research assistant at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the University of Munich. It was completed in December 2015 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in May 2016. The...

Labor mobility is commonly taken as a property of an optimal currency area. But how does that property affect the outcome of fiscal policies? In our model, we show that perfect (costless) labour mobility is not necessarily welfare improving, since it prevents the national fiscal authorities from...

After the financial and economic crisis in Europe, a broad consensus has emerged that a stronger fiscal dimension may be needed to complete the architecture of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper analyses the performance of interregional transfers in existing fiscal-federal systems,...

This paper describes the institutional flaws that led to the euro crisis, assesses the institutional reforms that were put in place during and in the aftermath of the crisis, and evaluates the remaining fragilities of the architecture of the European monetary union. In mid-2017, growth in the...

The view is widespread that there are just two options for the future of the Eurozone – either it is complemented by a fiscal union, or it will fall apart. In this paper, we discuss five possible elements of a fiscal union, of which three are in the centre of the current debate on fiscal union...

After the financial and economic crisis in Europe, a broad consensus has emerged that a stronger fiscal dimension may be needed to complete the architecture of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper analyses the performance of interregional transfers in existing fiscal-federal systems,...

After the financial and economic crisis in Europe, a broad consensus has emerged that a stronger fiscal dimension may be needed to complete the architecture of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper analyses the performance of interregional transfers in existing fiscal-federal systems,...

This paper studies how fiscal rules interact with the intergovernmental fiscal framework to foster fiscal discipline among European subnational governments. We use political variables describing the fiscal attitudes of the central government as instruments to obtain consistent estimates of the...