Fiscal Policy, Relative Prices, and Net Exports in a Currency Union

Fiscal Institutions for a Currency Union

Discussion of “The Effects of Housing Prices and Monetary Policy in a Currency Union”

Central questions raised by recent experience are “why do housing prices fluctuate?” and “what should central banks do about it?” For member states of a currency union, such as Spain or Texas, independent monetary policy cannot be conducted, so that it is important to inquire whether fluctuating housing prices make currency union participation undesirable. In this timely paper, Oriol Aspachs-Br...

From Hard Currency Policy to Monetary Union

In the wake of monetary integration in Europe, Austria abandoned the tested hard currency policy (HCP) for joining EMU as a member. The final target of monetary policy and real sector adjustment needs are similar in both regimes, and the HCP may therefore be viewed as a convenient "training camp" for later EMU accession. Georg Winckler devoted a number of essays on the critique, but also on the...

Monetary and Fiscal Policy in a Monetary Union

The idea that a common monetary policy in a monetary union imposes costs when compared with independent policies at the country level is largely widespread in the literature. This result leads directly to a greater emphasis on national Þscal policies. We show in this paper that a common monetary policy has more power to asymmetrically affect countries than is usually stated in the literature. A...

Overturning Mundell: Fiscal Policy in a Monetary Union

Central to ongoing debates over the desirability of monetary unions is a supposed trade-off, outlined by Mundell [1961]: a monetary union reduces transactions costs but renders stabilization policy less effective. If shocks across countries are sufficiently correlated, then, according to this argument, delegating monetary policy to a single central bank is not very costly and a monetary union i...