Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

This paper first discusses concepts, definitions and theoretical explanations for international business cycles. This is followed by an overview of previous empirical studies. We then argue that for ex post analyses the output gap is a univariate quantification of the business cycle that is...

**The following is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract.** Why are business cycles statistics so different from one country to the other, at least for trade related variables? This paper tries to replicate this feature of the data in an international real business cycle model...

This paper analyzes the stabilizing properties of alternative monetary policy regimes. In practice there is a choice between two broad types of monetary policy regimes: a fixed exchange rate regime or a floating exchange rate regime. In this paper I compare exchange rate targeting with different...