This paper investigates China's role in creating global imbalances, and the related call for a massive renminbi revaluation as a (supposed) panacea to forestall their reemergence as the world economy recovers from severe crisis. We reject the prominence widely attributed to China as a cause of...

The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

The global financial crisis has increased pressures on governments to pursue wide-ranging banking reform, highlighting the importance of domestic responses to globalization. In this paper, we study mass policy preferences on banking reform as well as the change of those preferences in response...

The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 crystallized the underlying imbalances that are currently acting to tear apart the Euro area monetary and fiscal systems by focusing markets and public attention on the core cause of the overall Euro crisis, the insolvency of the Euro area member-states...

We study the cross-border impact of quantitative easing (QE) in the major advanced economies, especially on emerging market economies. We first examine the cross-border financial market impact of central bank announcements of asset purchase programmes. We find marked QE announcement effects on...

While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms led to wage restraint and consequently consumption dampening accompanied by...

This paper discusses the literature which associates the economic characteristics of EMU with arguments of the optimum currency area (OCA) theory and asks for missing capstones that would meliorate EMU to eventually resemble an OCA. As potential candidates for such building blocks, some sort of...

This chapter presents the results of the comprehensive literature survey and supportive empirical assessment of the potential impacts of the Financial Transactions Tax recently adopted by the European Commission in response to the significant financial sector misallocations arising from the...

This paper surveys the literature on tax competition, and uses it to analyse current European proposals to harmonise corporate tax rates. It begins, in the course of Section One, by introducing the phenomenon of international tax competition, and illustrates, with the use of secondary research,...

In all of the new countries formed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, other than the Baltics, the value-added taxes (VATs) adopted were quot;hybridquot; VATs that treat CIS trade differently from trade with the rest of the world. This paper inquires whether this is appropriate. The paper...