The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

This paper examines the optimal monetary delegation arrangement of central bank independence and conservatism in the presence of uncertainty about the central bank’s output objective. We show that full independence is no longer optimal with uncertain central bank preferences, and that optimal...

Review of: Transition and Economics: Politics, Markets, and Firms. By Gérard Roland. 2000. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London

The paper uses a comprehensive data set with bilateral direct investment flows and establishes the influence of the de-facto exchange rate regime for FDI flows. We find a strong and significant effect from fixed rates on bilateral FDI flows in developed economies, but no significant effect for...

This paper examines the argument that monetary union requires an equalization of labour standards in member countries. It is shown that labour standards have an influence on national rates of unemployment, but that it is independent from monetary union.

When enacting labor market regulation governments face courts that interpret and implement the legal code. We show that the incentives for governments for labor market reform increase with the uncertainty that is involved in the implementation of legal codes through courts. Given that judges...

The "conservative central banker" has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare-reducing if the trade union has an...