The Eurozone fiscal crisis has created pressure for institutional harmonization, but skeptics argue that cultural predispositions can prevent convergence in behavior. Our paper derives a robust cultural classification of ...

"Household access to financial products is often conditioned on previous use. However, banning access when learning is possible may be discriminatory or counterproductive. The ""experiment"" of German reunification ...

We ask whether cuts of government consumption lower or raise the sovereign default premium. To address this question, we set up a new data set for 38 emerging and advanced economies which contains quarterly time-series ...

"A number of recent studies regress a ""narratively"" identified measure of a macroeconomic shock directly on an outcome variable. In this note, we argue that this approach can be viewed as the reduced-form regression of ...

Since the mid-1990s, countries offering tax systems that facilitate international tax avoidance and evasion have been facing growing political pressure to comply with the internationally agreed standards of exchange of tax ...

This paper investigates whether a fiscal stimulus implies a different impact for flexible and rigid labour markets. The analysis is done for 11 advanced OECD economies. Using quarterly data from 1999 to 2013, I estimate a ...

The creation of the Banking Union is likely to come with substantial implications for the governance of Eurozone banks. The European Central Bank, in its capacity as supervisory authority for systemically important banks, ...

This paper analyzes sovereign risk shift-contagion, i.e. positive and significant changes in the propagation mechanisms, using bond yield spreads for the major eurozone countries. By emphasizing the use of two econometric ...

In this paper we compute the optimal tax and education policy transition in an economy where progressive taxes provide social insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk, but distort the education decision of households. ...

"There is a growing debate about complementing the European Monetary Union by a more comprehensive fiscal union. Against this background, this paper emphasizes that there is a trade-off in designing a system of fiscal ...