This paper studies the inflationary implications of interest bearing regional debt in a monetary union. Is this debt simply backed by future taxation with no inflationary consequences? Or will the circulation of region debt induce monetization by a central bank? We argue here that both outcomes...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy rules in a fiscal federation, such as the European Union. The focus of the analysis is the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the monetary authority. Each of the countries structures its fiscal policy...

We study the relationship between social segmentation and income inequality by means of the economic theory of clubs with private provision of the club good. After having characterized the equilibrium partition of society in clubs and investigating its characteristics, we show how the clubs'...

Examples abound in economics, politics and society where agents can enter partial cooperation schemes, i.e. they can collude with a subset of agents. Several constributions devoted to specific settings have claimed that such partial cooperation actually worsens welfare compared to the...

In contrast to Mundell's inquiry on the optimality of currency areas, this paper aims to understand under what circumstances will a Pareto-dominant monetary union be established. Using a multi-country overlapping generations model, we highlight gains from monetary union arising from reduced...

We consider a game where agents commit to action for two periods. This implies two different patterns of decisions: agents can synchronize or stagger their decisions. We compare the outcomes of both timing patterns, and show that spillovers and strategic interactions are crucial for such a...

We address in this paper the issue of leadership when two governments provide public goods to their constituencies with cross border externalities as both public goods are valued by consumers in both countries. We study a timing game between two different countries: before providing public...

This paper offers a framework to study commitment and cooperation issues in games with multiple policymakers. To reconcile some puzzles in the recent literature on the nature of policy interactions among nations, we prove that games characterized by different commitment and cooperation schemes...