This paper studies the design of the policy mix in a monetary union, that is, the institutional arrangement specifying the relationships between the various policymakers present in the union and the extent of their capacity of action. It is assumed that policymakers do not cooperate. Detailing...

In the revised monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB), “price stability is best maintained by aiming for two per cent inflation over the medium term”, with “symmetric commitment” to this target. “Symmetry means that the Governing Council considers negative and...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...

The fiscal decentralization impulse now sweeping the world often leads to partial decentralization, where subnational governments are funded by central transfers, rather than leading to full local autonomy. Despite the practical importance of this arrangement, the literature contains no economic...

We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a region comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighboring district, there is underprovision of public goods in both the city and...

Federal and state governments often differ in the capacity to pre-commit to expenditure and tax policy. Whether the implied sequence of public decisions has any efficiency implications is the subject of this paper. We resort to a setting which contrary to most of the literature does not exhibit...

We build a no-arbitrage model of the yield curves in a heterogeneous monetary union with sovereign default risk, which can account for the asymmetric shifts in euro area yields during the Covid-19 pandemic. We derive an affine term structure solution, and decompose yields into term premium and...

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 assess public finances solvency for Euro Area countries using quarterly data between 1999Q1 and 2020Q4. Through a country-by-country analysis, the answer to the title question is true. For most countries, (i) the primary budget balance reacts positively to the lagged public debt ratio and...