This book studies the dynamics of monetary and fiscal interactions in the Euro Area. The policy makers are the European Central Bank and national governments. The primary target of the ECB is low inflation. And the primary target of a national government is low unemployment. However, there is a short-run trade-off between low inflation and low unemployment. Here the main focus is on sequential policy decisions. Another focus is on simultaneous and independent policy decisions. And a third focus is on policy cooperation. There are demand shocks, supply shocks, and mixed shocks. There are country-specific shocks and common shocks. The key question is: Given a shock, what are the dynamic characteristics of the resulting process?

This book studies the strategic policy interactions in a monetary union. The leading protagonists are the European Central Bank and national governments. The target of the ECB is low inflation in Europe. The targets of a national government are low unemployment and a low structural deficit. There are demand shocks, supply shocks, and mixed shocks. There are country-specific shocks and common shocks. This book develops a series of basic, intermediate, and more advanced models. Here the focus is on the Nash equilibrium. The key questions are: Given a shock, can policy interactions reduce the existing loss? And to what extent can they do so? Another topical issue is policy cooperation. To illustrate all of this there are a lot of numerical examples. The present book is part of a larger research project on European Monetary Union, see the references given at the back of the book. Some parts of this project were presented at the World Congress of the International Economic Association, at the International Conference on Macroeconomic Analysis, at the International Institute of Public Finance, and at the International Atlantic Economic Conference. Other parts were presented at the Macro Study Group of the German Economic Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, at the Göttingen Workshop on International Economics, at the Halle Workshop on Monetary Economics, at the Research Seminar on Macroeconomics in Freiburg, at the Research Seminar on Economics in Kassel, and at the Passau Workshop on International Economics.

Dynamic Modeling of Monetary and Fiscal Cooperation Among Nations analyzes coordination of monetary and fiscal stabilization policies between countries and currency areas using a dynamic game approach. The first four chapters introduce the reader to the dynamics of fiscal and monetary policy cooperation. Issues covered include: fiscal coordination, fiscal stringency requirements, structural and bargaining power asymmetries and the design of monetary and fiscal policymaking in a monetary union. In the four last chapters multiple-player settings with aspects of fiscal and/or monetary coordination are analyzed using the endogenous coalition formation approach. The analysis is focused on shock and model asymmetries and issues of multi-country coordination in the presence of (possibly many) monetary unions.

This book addresses three big economic challenges from a dynamic perspective: European integration, economic growth, and global climate change. In the light of the recent crises of the European Union (EU), the first part of the book deals with challenges to the real, monetary and fiscal integration of the EU and required institutional adjustments. The second part of the book addresses fundamental challenges of advanced market economies like economic growth and changes of technologies. The final part focuses on the global challenge of climate change from an economic perspective and discusses policy strategies for a successful mitigation of climate change.

This book studies unemployment and inflation in economic crises, first considering the scenario of a demand shock in Europe. In that case, monetary and fiscal interaction would cause widespread oscillations in European unemployment and European inflation. And what is more, there would be equally far-reaching fluctuations in the European money supply and European government purchases. These monetary and fiscal interactions would have no effects on the American economy. Second, it examines the scenario of a supply shock in Europe, in which monetary and fiscal interactions would have no effects on European unemployment or European inflation; there would also be an explosion of European government purchases and an implosion of the European money supply. Monetary and fiscal interactions would produce uniform oscillations in American unemployment and American inflation. Lastly, we would also see an implosion of both the American money supply and American government purchases.

Dynamic game theory serves the purpose of including strategic interaction in decision making and is therefore often applied to economic problems. This book presents the state-of-the-art and directions for future research in dynamic game theory related to economics. It was initiated by contributors to the 12th Viennese Workshop on Optimal Control, Dynamic Games and Nonlinear Dynamics and combines a selection of papers from the workshop with invited papers of high quality.

This book reviews the different approaches used to model the dynamic interactions between climate and economies, and proposes new avenues of research. Its fourteen chapters deal with various aspects of the building of integrated assessment models, either by coupling economic growth and climate change modules, or using mathematical models of viability or dynamic game theory to represent the interactions between the world regions concerned.

Institutional Dynamics of European Integration is devoted to the topic of the institutional law of the Communities, and contains a timely collection of essays by eminent experts. While this volume will certainly refine legal understanding of the European Union in its present complex phase of development, it also constitutes a warm personal tribute to Henry Schermers, teacher and scholar of international renown and a pioneer of European Community law.

The European debt crisis has given new impetus to the debate on economic policy coordination. In economic literature, the need for coordination has long been denied based on the view that fiscal, wage and monetary policy actors should work independently. However, the high and persistent degree of macroeconomic disparity within the EU and the absence of an optimum currency area has led to new calls for examining policy coordination. This book adopts an institutional perspective, exploring the incentives for policymakers that result from coordination mechanisms in the fields of fiscal, monetary and wage policy. Based on the concept of externalities, the work examines cross-border spillovers (e.g. induced by fiscal policy) and cross-policy spillovers (e.g. between fiscal and monetary policies), illuminating how they have empirically changed over time and how they have been addressed by policymakers. Steinbach introduces a useful classification scheme that distinguishes between vertical and horizontal coordination as well as between cross-border and cross-policy coordination. The author discusses farther-reaching forms of fiscal coordination (e.g. debt limits, insolvency proceedings, Eurobonds) with special attention to how principals of state organization affect their viability. Federal states and Bundesstaaten differ in the incentives they offer for debt accumulation – and thus in their suitability for fiscal coordination. Steinbach finds that the originally strict separation between policy areas has undergone significant change during the debt crisis. Indeed, recent efforts to coordinate policy are no longer limited to one policy area, but now extend to several areas. Steinbach argues that further fiscal policy coordination can be effectively deployed to address policy externalities, but that the coordination mechanisms used must match the form of state organization in the first place. Regarding wage policies, there are significant barriers to coordination. Notwithstanding some empirical successes in the implementation of a productivity-oriented wage policy, the high heterogeneity of national wage-setting institutions is likely to prevent any wage coordination.

Leading scholars and policy makers examine the challenges that are facing economic policies in the EMU today.