Country-specific factors prevent a strong linear relationship between the legislature''s budgetary powers and the extent of its separation from the executive. Electoral and voting systems, bicameralism, constitutional and legal constraints, voluntary contracts of political parties, and...

Recent work on the political economy of fiscal policy has asked how budgetary institutions affect fiscal outcomes. But what determines the budgetary institutions? In this paper I consider one such institution: the executive veto. A simple theoretical framework predicts that jurisdictions with...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

In this paper we analyze the degree of policy convergence of EMS member countries relative to that of some non-EMS countries. Interestingly, we find convergence for the nominal and real exchange rates and money supplies of the EMS members but not for the non-EMS countries. We also provide some...

A common rationale for EMS membership is that it enhances the credibility of a central bank’s commitment to stable monetary growth. In this paper we consider this idea in the light of two features of the system, namely, the existence of exchange rate bands and the prevalence of capital...

This paper describes how growing economic integration within the European Community increases the scope for any one EC country to impose adverse externalities on other member countries by manipulating its capital income taxes. After examining several alternatives to concerted tax harmonization,...

This paper extends recent work by Feldstein and Horioka (1980) and Bayoumi (1990), and examines saving-investment correlations for industrial countries in the post-war period. The focus of the enquiry is on differences observed between EMS and non-EMS countries. It is seen that the EMS countries...

This study shows that the aggregate demand for M1 in the group of countries participating in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System can be expressed as a stable function of ERM-wide income, inflation, interest rates, and the exchange rate of the European Currency Unit...

Financial integration is likely to entail EEC-wide convergence in both inflation rates and bank reserve requirements, thereby lowering some governments’ seignorage revenues. These revenue losses, however, may be offset by concomitant effects on exchange rate expectations and on interest rates...

A simple two-country stochastic model is used to analyze monetary policy interaction in a system of exchange rate bands such as the EMS, in the context of internationally-integrated financial markets. We consider the widely-acknowledged asymmetry of the system, as it pertains to member...