Kehoe, Patrick J.Pastorino, Elena2016-07-112016-07-112015-11Kehoe, Patrick J.; Pastorino, Elena. Fiscal unions redux. 2015 http://hdl.handle.net/10230/27023http://hdl.handle.net/10230/27023Before the advent of sophisticated international financial markets, the 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. This belief prompts a question: 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 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 social 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 across member countries is needed only when individual countries are either unable or unwilling to pursue desirable policies.application/pdfengThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properlyattributed.info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaperInternational transfersOptimal currency areaInternational financial marketsFiscal externalitiesCross-country externalitiesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess