The paper is organized around two main questions. The first is, why is the eversion to exchange rate fluctuations stronger in Europe than elsewhere? the second question is: how does the EMS hold together?

This paper reviews the arguments for and against monetary unification in Europe, taking into account the recent shift in emphasis in the analysis of exchange-rate regimes.

The Italian economy has often puzzled foreign observers over the past fifteen years. In this article we attempt to interpret these developments. In our interpretation, some implications of which are perhaps of more than local interest, we stress the role of policies throughout the period.

The question that we ask in this paper is whether the danger of confidence crisis can be reduced by acting on the choice of the maturity structure of public debt.

In the past three years, the countries that belong to the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System (EMS) have experienced a very rapid process of financial integration.

In most European countries, the high real interest rates of the early 1980s combined with the large stock of public debt inherited from the 1970s to create a potentially explosive debt problem.

We study whether cultural attitudes towards gender, the young, and leisure are significant determinants of the evolution over time of the employment rates of women and of the young, and of hours worked in OECD countries. Beyond controlling for a larger menu of policies, institutions and...

This paper argues that Central Europe should draw the lessons from the Asian and Mexican crises: hard money and sound credit are essential in a world where capital is intensely mobile, contagion pervasive and the economic and social costs of crises nothing short of formidable. We argue that...