Seminar - Inter-State Risk Sharing in a Diverse Monetary Union

Participants of this seminar will learn that the European monetary union can be understood as a pool of diverse country risks. Inter-state cooperation is required to insure these risks mutually. But this inter-state cooperation is prone to failure and we will discuss examples in which cooperation failed but also in which it succeeded. Even when cooperation is achieved, however, for instance in order to provide emergency funding for member states that are shut out of bond markets, the cooperative element can be hard to see: harsh conditionality was attached in return for unprecedented levels of sovereign bailouts. At the end of the seminar, participants should be able to understand how massive institution building was possible despite deep political divisions.