This paper studies the incentives to join or enlarge a monetary union under alternative assumptions about the extent of market reform within the union and in candidate countries. Lack of labour mobility, wage/price flexibility or fiscal reform brings costs for both new entrants and in the...

The identification of a possible European business cycle has been inconclusive and is complicated by the enlargement to the new member states and their transition to market economies. This paper shows how to decompose a business cycle into a time-frequency framework in a way that allows us to...

This paper investigates the uncovered interest parity hypothesis in an unusual way. We provide empirical evidence on the efficiency of capital markets using a time domain approach. However, a common prediction from theoretical models is that inefficient capital markets cause greater volatility...

The Optimal Currency Area theory stresses the importance of co-movement of the business cycles of member states in order for the common currency to be successful. Yet, the identification of (European) business cycles has been inconclusive and is complicated by the enlargement to the new member...

In this paper, we show how to derive the spectra and cross-spectra of economic time series from an underlying econometric or VAR model. This allows us to conduct a proper frequency analysis evaluation of economic and financial variables on a reduced sample of data, without it being ruled out by...

Using the device of generational accounting, this paper assesses the distribution of lifetime net tax payments across gender and generations in Denmark. We find two significant biases associated with the current structure and stance of public finances. First, not only do men contribute a much...

Flexibility in fiscal policy is a necessary ingredient in a policy package for EMU. Even with strong endogenous shock absorbers, such as real wage flexibility, fiscal policy can speed up the stabilization process in response to demand shocks. If real wages are rigid, as they typically are in...

If public goods and transfers are relatively more valuable to the poor, the elderly poor stand to lose from public debt reduction achieved through spending cuts. When long-term surpluses produced by debt reduction are recycled into higher provision of public goods and transfers, future...

This paper investigates the magnitude of the mismeasurement that occurs when only a few education categories are used in the construction of a constant quality index for labor input. By employing a very comprehensive data set it is found that the error resulting from the omission of information...