Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real ex-change rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange...

Conventional wisdom states that the statutory split of payroll taxa- tion between rms and workers is of no macroeconomic relevance, because the tax incidence is fully determined by the market structure. This pa- per breaks with this view by establishing a theoretical link between the statutory...

We show in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework that the introduction of a common currency by a group of countries with only partially integrated goods markets, incomplete …nancial markets and no labor migration across member states, signi…cantly increases volatility of...