This is the first Paper that looks at regional tax competition within one single country. In many countries in Europe, regions within a country differ substantially in their economic development and attractiveness to firms. Belgium is a typical example of a country where the economic situation...

This paper analyzes performance of the transition economies in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in terms of their convergence in selected macroeconomic fundamentals. The analysis uses monthly data on industrial output, money aggregate (M1), consumer prices and producer prices...

In terms of macroeconomic performance, the Eurozone’s first decade is a story of successful inflation-targeting by the ECB for the common currency area as a whole combined with the persistence of real exchange rate and current account disequilibria at member country level. According to the...

In the aftermath of World War II, Italy and France experienced high inflation. The two countries enacted remarkably similar economic policy measures, but stabilization came at different times: for Italy at the end of 1947, and for France a year later. Traditional explanations for the restoration...

What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bond market from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the limited credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914, gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved 40 to 60 basis...

We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that established time-series and panel methods substantially exaggerate the persistence of real exchange rates because of heterogeneity in the dynamics of disaggregated relative prices. When...

This paper analyzes the determinants of cross-border asset trade on cross-country data and a Swedish data set. We focus our analysis on the effect of the euro for the determinants of bond trade, equity and banking assets. With the help of a theoretical model, we attempt to disentangle the...

The debate on EMU has been very influenced by the traditional theory of optimum currency areas (OCAs). The paper shows that this theory is not an ideal yardstick for an assessment of EMU. Its assumptions are not very realistic and its focus on asymmetric real shocks is much too narrow. In...

We use a standard metric from international finance, the currency risk premium, to assess the credibility of fixed exchange rates during the classical gold standard era. Theory suggests that a completely credible and permanent commitment to join the gold standard would have zero currency risk or...

This paper is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation of...