The main characteristic of the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) is the transition from various national currencies to the Euro, the common European currency. A final fixing of the individual bilateral exchange rates of all European countries involved in the Monetary Union...

Als Harry Johnson vor genau 20 Jahren sein Plädoyer für flexible Wechselkurse hielt, waren die Weichen zur Auflösung des Festkurssystems von Bretton Woods bereits gestellt. Die zu Beginn der fünfziger Jahre vielbeklagte Dollarknappheit war längst einer Dollarflut gewichen. Das...

Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has transformed Europe and has created an integrated pan-European economy. Much research has focused on understanding this integration process and what benefits and costs it entails. This paper identifies a political economy channel of EMU as the monetary union...

This paper investigates the R&D persistence of R&D active firms in different markets with different intensities of competition, based on firm-level panel data for the period 1996-2008. In a dynamic setting of the empirical model it turns out that persistence is strongly related to market...

This paper analyzes the stabilizing properties of alternative monetary policy regimes. In practice there is a choice between two broad types of monetary policy regimes: a fixed exchange rate regime or a floating exchange rate regime. In this paper I compare exchange rate targeting with different...

Using data on border enforcement and macroeconomic indicators from the United States and Mexico, we estimate a two-country business cycle model of labor migration and remittances. The model matches the cyclical dynamics of unskilled migration and documents the insurance role of remittances in...

Existing results on the contribution of terms of trade and world interest rate shocks to output fluctuations in small open economies range from less than 10% to almost 90%. We argue that an identification problems lies at the heart of these vastly different results. In this paper, we overcome...