Essays on European Integration

This doctoral thesis represents an accumulation of articles on different topics from the broad research field of European economic and monetary integration. The analysis shows that a core monetary union with Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and at most Slovenia would be more desirable than the current constellation. Real appreciation driven by the progress in transition, productivity growth and increasing demand for tradable goods makes other member states in transition less desirable members of the monetary union. In the second part the focus turns to some political economy aspects of the European integration. Empirical analyses show that the level of trust in European institutions can be explained to a large extent by the existence of principal-agent problems in the structures of political institutions that is more severe at the European than at the national level. The thesis is completed by an analysis of the monetary policy rule used by the Bundesbank as a potential prototype for the ECB