The paper provides and empirical characterization of fiscal policy in the euro area and in a group of twenty-two OECD economies over the period from 1970 until 2007. Using the cyclically-adjusted fiscal balance we document that policy in the euro area has been mildly pro-cyclical. The adoption...

This paper was prepared for a session of the 2009 American Economic Association meeting devoted to examining the views of American economists about the euro and the European Economic and Monetary Union on the tenth anniversary of the euro. I had written an article in 1992 in the Economist and...

This paper investigates whether or not the adoption of the Euro has facilitated the introduction of structural reforms, defined as deregulation in the product markets and liberalization and deregulation in the labor markets. After reviewing the theoretical arguments that may link the adoption of...

The possibility that the euro area might break up was being raised even before the single currency existed. These scenarios were then lent new life five or six years on, when appreciation of the euro and problems of slow growth in various member states led politicians to blame the European...

We consider the effect of excluding government investment from the deficit subject to the limits of the European Stability and Growth Pact. In the model we consider, residents of a given country discount future costs and benefits of government spending more than efficiency would dictate, because...

In this paper, we review Otmar Issing's career as the ECB's inaugural chief economist and we document many notable successes. We try to infer some general principles that contributed to these successes and draw some lessons. In doing so, we review the evidence using Woodford%u2019s (2003) recent...

The perceptions of a central bank's inflation aversion may reflect institutional structure or, more dynamically, the history of its policy decisions. In this paper, we present a novel empirical framework that uses high frequency data to test for persistent variation in market perceptions of...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) will involve socialization of the existing seigniorage wealth of the national central banks, because the Euro will have to be bought by these banks in exchange for assets which have been accumulated in the historical process of money creation. This socialization...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of transmission rates from exchange rate movements to import prices, across countries and product categories, in the euro area over the last fifteen years. Our results show that the transmission of exchange rate changes to import prices in the short run...