The economics of monetary unions

The dissertation consists of three chapters in International Macroeconomics devoted to studying the dynamic behavior of a small open economy within a monetary union. The first two chapters explore the role of expectations and informational frictions for a member country of a monetary union. The first chapter addresses the question of sovereign debt crisis contagion in a model where sovereign default and an exit from a monetary union are separate but interrelated decisions. The second chapter investigates instability driven by inflation expectations, and suggests heterogeneous inflation histories as one of the factors responsible for the large macroeconomic imbalances within the Eurozone. The study of issues related to monetary unions and economic crises involves the use of models where non-linearities and uncertainty matter, but those features pose computational challenges to the modeler. Therefore, the last chapter proposes a novel method for solving dynamic stochastic models, that preserves the original non-linearity of the model, takes into account uncertainty, but at the same time allows approximating the model locally and, hence, avoiding the curse of dimensionality