We use a simple macroeconomic modeling of a monetary union made of two structurally heterogeneous countries, with distortions in the supply function. We find that higher taxes are always output stabilizing in the event of demand shocks, but that stronger automatic stabilizers are often inflation...

[fre] De nombreuses études ont souligné le conflit d’objectifs entre les autorités économiques européennes suite à un choc d’offre négatif : la politique monétaire est restrictive pour préserver la stabilité des prix et les politiques budgétaires expansives pour soutenir...

The paper analyzes the usefulness of budgetary cooperation in a monetary union, even if it is limited to a subgroup of countries with close structural characteristics. The author finds that its advantages depend on the nature of the shocks and on the width of the heterogeneities within the...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

This paper propounds a revue of literature about the limits of the current European institutional framework. First, it appears that the status of the European Central Bank, and particularly its quasi exclusive aim to maintain the stability of prices, don’t ease the possibilities of...

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...

In the context of a new Keynesian macroeconomic model, this paper studies the monetary policy that should be conducted by the common central bank of a monetary union. In the event of inflationary supply shocks, the optimal monetary policy should be all the more contractionary as the inflation...