The origins of the Greek-sovereign debt crisis were the country’s large fiscal and external imbalances. The key factor that abetted those imbalances was the absence of a short-tomedium term adjustment mechanism -- due to perceptions of sovereign bailouts -- in the euro-area that would have...

On February 24-25, 2006 an international workshop on “Regional and International Currency Arrangements” was held in Vienna. It was co-sponsored by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Bank of Greece, and jointly organized by Eduard Hochreiter and George Tavlas. Academic economists and...

We compare monetary union to flexible exchange rates in an asymmetric, three country model with active monetary policy. Unlike the traditional OCA literature, we find that countries with a high degree of nominal wage rigidity benefit from monetary union, specially when they join other, similarly...