Abstract: The European sovereign debt crisis is characterized by the simultaneous surge in borrowing costs in the GIPS countries after 2008. We present a theory, which can account for the behavior of sovereign bond spreads in Southern Europe between 1998 and 2012. Our key theoretical argument is...

In 1993, Czechoslovakia experienced a two-fold break-up: On January 1st, the country disintegrated as a political union, while preserving an economic and monetary union. Then, the Czech-Slovak monetary union collapsed on February 8th. We analyze the economic background of the two break-ups, and...

We analyse the proposed "Stability Pact" for countries joining a European Monetary Union (EMU). In an EMU shortsighted governments fail to fully internalise the inflationary consequences of their debt policies. This results in excessive debt accumulation. Therefore, while in the absence of EMU...

The replacement of national currencies by a common currency in the EMU causes a monetary externality if the European Central Bank is inclined to monetize part of outstanding government debt in the community.High government debt in one part of the EU then increases the common inflation rate.We...

We present a new approach to study empirically the effect of the introduction of the euro on currency invoicing. Our approach uses a compositional multinomial logit model, in which currency choice depends on the characteristics of both the currency and the country. We use unique quarterly panel...

In stationary point process theory, the concept Palm distribution plays an important role.Many important results (like for instance Little s law, so important in many fields) arise from it.However, in the non-stationary case a whole family of local Palm distributions (PD s) has to be considered...

The international exchange of tax information, and its merits compared to withholding taxes, is the central topic in current debates in international tax policy.The purpose of this paper is to characterize and compare the tax regimes that emerge with and without information exchange, under the...