Countries in a monetary union can adjust to shocks either through internal or external mechanisms. We quantitatively assess for the European Union a number of relevant mechanisms suggested by Mundell’s optimal currency area theory, and compare them to the United States. For this purpose, we...

We study incentives of banks to reserve liquidity given that they can rely on the interbank market to mitigate crisis-related liquidity shocks. Banks can partially pledge their assets to each other, but not to the rest of the economy. Therefore liquidity provision is endogenous. We show that if...