By examining the impact of the introduction of the Euro on stock markets and on country diversification within the Eurozone, the evidence does not suggest a high risk to the stock market to justify a risk premium as a result of currency union. Although the Euro market integration has increased inter-country correlations, it does not preclude gains from international diversification, which parti...

We study the impact of the Euro on prices charged by online retailers within the EU. Our data spans the period before and after the Euro was introduced, covers a variety of products, and includes countries inside and outside of the Eurozone. Our main finding is that the Euro changeover in 2002 neither mitigated price differences nor resulted in purchasing power parity for products sold online. ...

Interactions between the eurozone and US booms and busts and among major eurozone economies are analyzed by introducing a panel Markov-switching VAR model well suitable for a multi-country cyclical analysis. The model accommodates changes in low and high data frequencies and endogenous time-varying transition matrices of the country-specific Markov chains. The transition matrix of each Markov c...

Institutionalizing Eurozone Exit: A modified NEWNEY approach Steffen Huck, Justin Mattias Valasek* In this note, we argue that the Eurozone needs an institutional exit mechanism to enhance Eurozone stability, and propose modifications to the Dobbs' NEWNEY mechanism, the only mechanism that satisfies the twin properties of eliminating incentives for intra-Eurozone capital flight and maintaining ...

In this paper we investigate the empirical pass-through of the nominal exchange rates to the consumer price indexes (CPIs) for five Eurozone countries vis-à-vis the United States. There are significant structure changes in these countries during the European integration. The Eurozone CPIs have been insulated from the exchange rate shocks since that integration; on the other hand, we find that t...

Empirical evidence obtained from data covering Eurozone countries, other industrialized countries, and newly industrialized countries (NICs) over 1980– 2006 shows that exchange rate uncertainty has a consistent positive and significant effect on the volatility of bilateral trade flows. A one standard deviation increase in exchange rate uncertainty leads to an eight per cent increase in trade vo...

We find evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIGS countries in the Eurozone during 2010-11 was disconnected from underlying increases in the debt to GDP ratios, and was the result of negative market sentiments that became very strong since the end of 2010. We also find evidence that after years of neglecting high government debt, investors became increasingly worr...

Outbreak of 2009 European sovereign debt (leverage) crisis has been one of the most crucial economic events of recent years. Accordingly, researchers devoted a great deal of efforts to elucidate origins and consequences of this crisis, particularly focusing on its potential effect on international trade flows. Yet in the literature, there have been rare studies on exploring the effects of sover...

This paper focuses on two core tax design issues that arise in addressing current fiscal challenges. It first explores the idea, prominent in troubled Eurozone countries, of a “fiscal devaluation”: shifting from social contributions to the VAT as a way to mimic a nominal devaluation. Empirical evidence is presented which suggests that in Eurozone countries this may indeed improve the trade bala...

We investigate the link between real exchange rates and sectoral total factor productivity measures for countries in the Eurozone. Real exchange rate patterns closely accord with an amended Balassa-Samuelson interpretation, both in cross-section and time series. We construct a sticky price dynamic general equilibrium model to generate a crosssection and time series of real exchange rates that c...