Fiscal unions redux

Patrick Kehoe and Elena Pastorino

Economic Theory, 2017, vol. 64, issue 4, No 7, 776 pages

Abstract: Abstract Before the advent of sophisticated international financial markets, a widely accepted belief was that within a monetary union, a union-wide authority orchestrating fiscal transfers between countries is necessary to provide adequate insurance against country-specific economic fluctuations. A natural question is then: Do sophisticated international financial markets obviate the need for such an active union-wide authority? We argue that they do. Specifically, we show that in a benchmark economy with no international financial markets, an activist union-wide authority is necessary to achieve desirable outcomes. With sophisticated international financial markets, however, such an authority is unnecessary if its only goal is to provide cross-country insurance. Since restricting the set of policy instruments available to member countries does not create a fiscal externality across them, this result holds in a wide variety of settings. Finally, we establish that an activist union-wide authority concerned just with providing insurance to member countries is optimal only when individual countries are either unable or unwilling to pursue desirable policies.

Keywords: Cross-country externalities; Cross-country insurance; Cross-country transfers; Fiscal externalities; International financial markets; International transfers; Optimal currency area (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E60 E61 F33 F36 F38 F42 F45 G15 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Working Paper: Fiscal unions redux (2017)
Working Paper: Fiscal Unions Redux (2017)
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DOI: 10.1007/s00199-016-1016-x

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