TY - JOUR AU - Alesina,Alberto AU - Ardagna,Silvia AU - Galasso,Vincenzo TI - The Euro and Structural Reforms JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14479 PY - 2008 Y2 - November 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14479 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14479.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Alberto F. Alesina Department of Economics Harvard University Littauer Center 210 Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-8388 Fax: 617/495-7730 E-Mail: aalesina@harvard.edu Silvia Ardagna Global Economics Global Investment Research 130 Peterborough Court 133 Fleet Street London EC4A 2BB United Kingdom Tel: 44 (0) 20 7051 0584 E-Mail: Silvia.Ardagna@gs.com Vincenzo Galasso Universita' della Svizzera Italiana via Buffi 14 6900 Lugano Switzerland E-Mail: vincenzo.galasso@unibocconi.it M1 - published as Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Vincenzo Galasso. "The Euro and Structural Reforms," in Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi, editors, "Europe and the Euro" University of Chicago Press (2010) M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2009-04-01 AB - This paper investigates whether or not the adoption of the Euro has facilitated the introduction of structural reforms, defined as deregulation in the product markets and liberalization and deregulation in the labor markets. After reviewing the theoretical arguments that may link the adoption of the Euro and structural reforms, we investigate the empirical evidence. We find that the adoption of the Euro has been associated with an acceleration of the pace of structural reforms in the product market. The adoption of the Euro does not seem to have accelerated labor market reforms in the "primary labor market;" however, the run up to the Euro adoption seems to have been accompanied by wage moderation. We also investigate issues concerning the sequencing of goods and labor market reforms. ER -