Putting a technocratic body in charge of setting elements of eurozone fiscal policy could act to stabilise Europe's crisis-prone monetary union, Harvard professor Eric Maskin said at the European Central Bank's first research conference.

Maskin, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2007, pointed to the same "serious flaw" in the eurozone that many other economists have noted: monetary unions without a centralised fiscal authority will struggle to adjust to idiosyncratic shocks. But