The paper presents various tests of the hypothesis that, through the mechanism of the European Monetary System. Germany exercised a counter-inflationary leadership role in the 1980s. Evidence is provided that expectations of German inflation may be thought of as having impacted more strongly on...

The debate about a European Monetary Union (EMU) revolves mainly about two issues: the costs of the loss of a national policy instrument, in the form of stabilization and revenues of seigniorage, and the gains from policy coordination. We argue that the costs of giving up national seigniorage...

This paper analyses the effects of monetary shocks in the determination of exchange rates in economies where banks play a central role in providing finance for domestic investment and in international capital transactions. This is a situation that prevails in many countries, both developed and...

This paper explores the possible macroeconomic consequences of financial deregulation in an institutional environment where deregulation raises risks in banking. The central bank is assumed to maximize an objective function an argument of which is the probability of bank failure. It is then...

We assess the state of competition in the Spanish banking system at the dawn of the integration of the European financial market. Banking in Spain has undergone a strong liberalization process in the last fifteen years, which has accelerated recently, evolving from a situation of tight...

The paper addresses some of the effects of the removal of exchange controls in the UK in 1979. Nonparametric tests indicate that one consequence of the removal was a marked reduction in the volatility of the on-shore/off-shore differential. Co-integration tests suggest that abolition contributed...

This paper tries to assess how the current program of European integration will affect the structure of the European retail banking industry. It is argued that trade in banking services is, and will presumably remain, limited, while there is still concern about possible trade diversion. Next, we...

It is often claimed that the demand externality created by imperfectly competitive markets can provide an analytical basis for Keynesian fiscal policy prescriptions. Here this demand externality is embedded in a model where saving and employment are determined by optimizing choices in an...

Partial cooperation in setting trade policy may be worse than no cooperation for countries who form a customs union. The paper investigates three situations where this is likely to occur. First, if the countries forming the union comprise too small a percentage of the non-competitive sector of...