The common central bank of a monetary union tends to lead a more accommodative monetary policy in order to avoid the default of the moderately indebted member countries whereas the most hardly indebted countries have to default. The optimal inflation rate increases the more numerous are the...

The paper studies the opportunity to introduce a centralized insurance mechanism in Europe. Indeed, in a monetary union, monetary policy can efficiently stabilize common shocks but it is much less usable in case of asymmetrical shocks and /or if the countries are structurally heterogeneous....

The paper studies the appropriate weight that the central bank of a heterogeneous monetary union should give to each specific country. To stabilize symmetric shocks, the central bank should give a bigger weight to the countries where the rigidity in the labor market and the sensibility of the...