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This article introduces the special issue on the political economy of the Euro crisis, which aims to improve our understanding of the causes, consequences, and implications of the highly unusual nature of this crisis: a financial crisis among developed countries within a supranational monetary union. The article provides a brief chronology of the crisis, discusses its underlying causes, and reviews the ways in which comparative and international political economy can help us understand the crisis. The article then discusses the individual and collective contributions of the articles in the special issue and discusses possible future research paths on the political economy of the Euro crisis. We conclude with a brief discussion of how a political economy perspective informs our understanding of the long-term prospects for the Eurozone and European integration.

[Highlights] International financial institutions have promoted financial regulatory transparency, or the publication by supervisors of financial industry data. Financial regulatory transparency enhances market stability and increases democratic legitimacy. We introduce a new index of financial regulatory data transparency - the FRT Index. It measures how countries report to international financial institutions basic macro-prudential data about their financial systems. The Index covers 68 high-income and emerging-market economies over 22 years (1990-2011). We find a number of striking trends over this period. European Union members are generally more opaque than other high-income countries. This finding is especially relevant given efforts to create an EU capital markets union. Globally, financial regulatory data transparency has increased. However, there is considerable variation. Some countries have become significantly more transparent, while others have become much more opaque. Reporting tends to decline during financial crises. We propose that the EU institutions take on a greater role in coordinating and possibly enforcing reporting of bank and non-bank institution data. Similar to the United States, a reporting requirement should be part of any EU general deposit insurance scheme.

AbstractThis research note highlights an important element missing from rational design theories of international agreements: "institutional context"—the presence or absence of existing and prior agreements between prospective partners in "new" cooperation. If, as rational design theorists argue, agreement design is deliberate, strategic, and directed toward enhancing contracting parties' ability to credibly commit to future cooperation, then prior design "successes" should influence the terms of additional cooperation. We test for this omitted variable problem in three agreement design outcomes:ex antelimitations on agreement duration, exit clauses, and dispute-settlement provisions. Through an augmentation and reanalysis of data from a key study in the rational design literature—Barbara Koremenos's "Contracting Around International Uncertainty"—we show institutional context is positively correlated with inclusion ofex antetime limitations in negotiated agreements and negatively correlated with the inclusion of exit clauses and third-party dispute-settlement provisions. Institutional context also mediates and conditions the effects of the explanatory variable at the heart of existing rational design theories—uncertainty about the future distribution of gains from cooperation. Our findings show that the collective appeal of particular design features varies not only with the nature of underlying strategic problems, but also with degrees of shared institutional context.