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What explains Eurozone member-states' divergent exposure to Europe's sovereign debt crisis? Deviating from current fiscal and financial views, From Convergence to Crisis focuses on labor markets in a narrative that distinguishes the winners from the losers in the euro crisis. Alison Johnston argues that Europe's monetary union was structured in a way that advantaged the corporatist labor markets of its northern economies in external trade and financial lending. Northern Europe's distinct economic advantage lay not with its fiscal capabilities, which were not that different from those of southern Eurozone countries, but with its wage-setting institutions. Through highly coordinated collective bargaining, the euro North persistently undercut the inflation performance of southern trading partners, destining them to a perpetual cycle of competitive decline and external borrowing. While northern Europe's corporatist labor markets were always low inflation performers, monetary union ultimately made their wage-setting institutions toxic for the South. The euro's institutional predecessor, the European Monetary System, included economic and institutional mechanisms that facilitated macroeconomic adjustment and convergence between the common currency's corporatist and noncorporatist economies. Combining cross-national statistical analysis with detailed qualitative case studies of Denmark, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain, Johnston reveals that monetary union's removal of these mechanisms allowed external imbalances between these two blocs to grow unchecked, underpinning the crisis in which Europe currently finds itself. Rather than achieving the EU's goal of an ever-closer union, the common currency produced a monetary environment that destabilized the economic integration of its diverse labor markets.

Recent literature on the European debt crisis emphasizes that rising external trade and lending imbalances between the European Monetary Union's (EMU) Northern and Southern member states served as a crucial determinant behind speculative divergence between these two regions. However, these gaping external imbalances only emerged with the launch of the single currency. In this paper, we examine how three different currency regimes – monetary union, fixed exchange rate, and flexible exchange rates – influence the mutual co-existence of export-led growth models (which predominate in the Eurozone's crisis-spared Northern economies) and domestic demand-led growth models (which predominate in the Eurozone's crisis-prone Southern economies). We hypothesize that external imbalances between these two growth models did not emerge prior to EMU because of the presence of two adjustment mechanisms in the real exchange rate: the nominal exchange rate (in soft currency regimes) and the promotion of inflation convergence by national central banks (in hard currency regimes). European monetary integration removed these two readjustment mechanisms, leading to a persistent divergence in the real exchange rate and ultimately to external imbalances between Europe's diverse models of capitalism.

Political economy literature documents how financial investors are more partial to right executives than left ones. Right cabinets face lower interest rates, less volatile stock prices and exchange rates, and higher credit ratings than left cabinets, even after accounting for fiscal differences. But does this advantage persist if right governments accommodate far right parties or ideas? I hypothesize that because far right populism can introduce political instability, markets' evaluation of right executives might deteriorate if they enter coalition with far right parties or adopt their positions. Employing a panel analysis of bond spread data, and a comparative case study of the Netherlands and Sweden, I find that right executives enjoy significantly lower spreads than their left-wing counter-parts, but this advantage disappears if they rule in coalition with the far right or produce overly right-wing manifestos. These findings highlight that right parties may encounter tangible borrowing costs and market rebuke if they accommodate far right populism.

"Comparative and International Political Economy and the Global Financial Crisis" published on by Oxford University Press.

Public sector unions push for unmerited wage increases, exacerbating inflation and deficits. Despite this conventional wisdom, governments in several European countries successfully limited public sector wage growth during the 1980s and 1990s. This article argues that the recent rise in public sector wage inflation in the eurozone is an unintended consequence of the shift towards Economic and Monetary Union. I argue that monetary union's predecessors, the European Monetary System and Maastricht, imposed an institutional constraint on governments, which enhanced their ability to impose moderation: national-level, inflation-averse central banks that could punish rent-seeking sectoral wage-setters via monetary contraction. Monetary union's alteration of this constraint weakened governments' capabilities to deny inflationary settlements.