The number of refugees worldwide is now 12 million, up from 3 million in the early 1970s. And the number seeking asylum in the developed world increased tenfold, from about 50,000 per annum to half a million over the same period. Governments and international agencies have grappled with the twin...

National labour market institutions interact across national boundaries when product markets are global. Labour market policies can thus entail spill-overs, a fact widely ignored in the academic literature. This paper studies the effects of wage subsidies in an international duopoly model with...

Coordination is a fundamental principle for economic policy in the EU. There is a consensus that soft coordination (exchange of information, general guidelines for economic policy) is useful. Whether stabilization policies should be coordinated is another matter. Against the background of the...

In the literature on international monetary policy, the paradigm is that gains from coordination are fairly small. Monetary policy is conducted to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations and gains from policy coordination arise from preventing national monetary authorities from strategically...

In this paper, I argue that international policy coordination requires to include both monetary as well as fiscal policy because both sides include policy instruments that allow the strategic manipulation of the country's terms of trade. Hence, the coordination of one part of national...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. We consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public spending and...

We argue that criticism concerning the Chinese dollar peg is misplaced as no predictable link exists between the exchange rate and the trade balance of an international creditor economy. The stable nominal yuan/dollar rate is argued to have stabilized Chinese, East Asian and global growth....

Wandernde Blasen, Krisen und hektische geldpolitische Rettungsaktionen haben das globale Zinsniveau gegen Null und die Staatsverschuldung in den großen Industrieländern auf historische Rekordstände gebracht. Das Papier analysiert die Optionen für den Exit aus Niedrigzinspolitiken und nicht...

This paper discusses Japan's strategy for Asian monetary integration. It argues that Japan faces three major policy challenges when promoting intraregional exchange rate stability. First, there must be some convergence of exchange rate regimes in East Asia, and the most realistic option is for...

Fiscal policy is widely criticized for its failure to act as a stabilizing countercyclical force in the European Monetary Union. Two periods should be distinguished: Prior to the Financial Crisis of 2008, when monetary policy had traction to pursue stability for the aggregate eurozone, fiscal...