On May 1, 2004, ten countries in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe will become full members of the EU. The parliaments and monetary authorities of the ten accession countries have already to a large extent adapted their legal and institutional structures to the new Europe-wide environment....

We use a panel of 16 OECD countries over several decades to investigate the effects of government debts and deficits on long-term interest rates. In simple static specifications, a one-percentage-point increase in the primary deficit relative to GDP increases contemporaneous long-term interest...

Symmetry vs. Asymmetry in einem festen Wechselkurssystem Mit dem Übergang vom Europäischen Währungssystem (EWS) zur Europäischen Währungsunion (EWU) wird ein asymmetrisches System (das EWS) durch ein symmetrisches (die EWU) ersetzt. Im Rahmen eines analytischen Zweiländermodells untersucht...

Financial frictions are a central element of most of the models that the literature on emerging markets crises has proposed for explaining the Sudden Stop phenomenon. To date, few studies have aimed to examine the quantitative implications of these models and to integrate them with an...

The recent debt crises in Europe and the U.S. states feature similar sharp increases in spreads on government debt but also show important differences. In Europe, the crisis occurred at high government indebtedness levels and had spillovers to the private sector. In the United States, state...