We assess the role of national fiscal policies, as automatic stabilizers, within a monetary union. We use a two-country New Keynesian DGE model which incorporates non-Ricardian consumers (as in Gal? et al. 2004) and a home bias in the composition of national consumption bundles. We find that...

We review the literature on business cycle correlation between the euro area and the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), a topic that has gained attention as the newest EU members approach monetary union. Our meta-analysis of 35 identified publications suggests some CEECs already...

We provide evidence on the fit of the hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve for selected euro zone countries, the US and the UK. Instead of imposing rational expectations and estimating the Phillips curve by the Generalized Method of Moments, we follow Roberts (1997) and Adam and Padula (2003) and...

The paper discusses key elements of optimal central bank design and applies its findings to the Eurosystem. A particular focus is on the size of monetary policy committees, the degree of centralization, and the representation of relative economic size in the voting rights of regional (or...

Der europäische Rat von Lissabon hat ein klares strategisches Ziel für die Europäische Union gesetzt: "Die Europäische Union soll zum wettbewerbsfähigsten und dynamischsten wissenbasierten Wirtschaftsraum der Welt gemacht werden - einem Wirtschaftsraum, der fähig ist, ein nachhaltiges...

Working within the 'distributional approach', this research offers evidence, based on empirical density estimates and modality tests, of past polarization in regional labour productivity in EU-15. Most importantly, it provides evidence on the related ergodic density which suggests that this...

When labor markets are imperfectly competitive, firms may be willing to finance general training if the wage structure is compressed, that is, if the increase of productivity after training is greater than the increase in pay. We propose a novel way of testing this proposition, which exploits...