Integrated markets and coordinated policies allow states to share risks that cannot be insured as well nationally. Business cycles are an example for a risk spread through markets: holding claims on the output of other countries allows citizens or firms to compensate a downturn in the domestic economy. Sovereign debt crises are an example for policy-based risk sharing: the IMF and the ESM shift some risk from crisis states and their creditors to taxpayers in states that underwrite the bond issue of these institutions. The current refugee crisis involves risk sharing through both labor markets and immigraition policies. This risk sharing between states is now discovered in the euro area: the most explicit statement of a move from discipline only to some risk sharing is the Five Presidents report published in June 2015. This panel explores, from different theoretical and methodological angles, this shift in paradigm as well as the limitations of risk sharing in practice. How radical a departure from existing ideas about policy coordination in the euro area would risk sharing between states be? Which distributive conflicts emerge? How different is risk and burden sharing in the euro area’s financial crisis from that of the refugee crisis at the EU’s Southern and Eastern borders? What would it take to make financial markets more reliable channels of risk sharing? And how limited is risk sharing between members of the European monetary union compared to that between states in a federation like the U.S.?