The European Union fulfills its emissions reductions commitments by means of an emissions trading scheme covering some part of each member state's economy and by national emissions control in the rest of their economies. The member states also levy energy/emissions taxes overlapping with the...

The European Union fulfills its emissions reductions commitments by means of an emissions trading scheme covering some part of each member state's economy and by national emissions control in the rest of their economies. The member states also levy energy/emissions taxes overlapping with the...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This paper investigates the in inflationary effects of fscal policy in an optimizing general equilibrium monetary model with capital accumulation, exible prices and wealth effects. The model is calibrated to Euro Area quarterly data. Simulation results show that government defcits, high debt...

This paper investigates the performance of optimised interest rate rules when there is uncertainty about a key determinant of the monetary transmission mechanism, namely the degree of persistence characterising the inflation process. The paper focuses on the euro area and utilises two variants of...

This paper reviews the key economic issues concerning the welfare costs of inflation and deflation, with a view to shedding light on the desirable properties of the inflation process. Our review of the evidence on the overall costs of inflation and deflation indicates that such costs could be...

This paper summarises the results of a quantitative study of the possible impact of downward nominal wage rigidity on the determination of inflation and output in the euro area and the existence of a non-vertical long-run Phillips curve. The study was undertaken in the context of the review of...

We derive fundamental new theory for measuring monetary service flows aggregated over countries within the European Monetary Union (EMU). We develop three increasingly restrictive approaches: (1) the heterogeneous agents approach, (2) the multilateral representative agent approach, and (3) the...

In the context of a stylised game theoretical framework of capital tax competition, we show that when repeated policy interactions are associated to a systematic punishment of the deviating policymaker, a co-ordinated outcome can be the solution to the non co-operative tax game. This result...

In this paper we first explore the impact of nominal and real persistence on the transmission process of various shocks in an estimated DSGE model of euro area. We then analyse its impact on optimal monetary policy and investigate the performance of various monetary policies when the policy...