By focusing on the near-term campaign in the 2014 European elections analysts have tended to over-look a series of longer-term trends that were jointly and inexorably leading to the Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidate) process and to some at least of the subsequent structural reforms to the...

Female labour force participation (hereinafter FLFP) trends across Eastern Europe, which were very high during communism, started to diverge substantially following its collapse. Women did not appear to benefit from the changing labour market conditions in those transition countries that pursued...

This paper explores the politics of the Fouchet Plan, the unsuccessful initiative by French President Charles de Gaulle in 1961-62 to create a new 'union of states' for foreign-policy and defence cooperation among the six founding members of the European Community. The paper traces the origins...

In this paper a panel analysis is employed to investigate the effects of governments' expenditure and taxation on stock market indexes in 11 members of the Eurozone. A significant number of studies have focused on the effects of monetary policy on the Eurozone stock markets, while only a limited...

In this paper we test the narrow Porter hypothesis on a sample of European economies in the period 1995-2008. We focus on the channels through which tighter environmental regulation affects productivity and innovation. Our findings suggest that the “narrow” Porter hypothesis cannot be...

Bayoumi-Eichengreen (1993) establish a EMU core-periphery pattern using 1963-1988 data. We use same methodology, sample, window length (1989-2015), and a novel over-identifying restriction test to ask whether the EMU strengthened or weakened the core-periphery pattern. Our results suggest the latter

Does regional decentralization threaten the commitment to regional equality in government outcomes? We attempt to shed light on this question by drawing on unique evidence from the largest European unitary states to have engaged in countrywide health system decentralization: Italy and Spain. We...

Regional economic development has been long conceptualised as a non-linear, interactive and socially embedded process: these features were traditionally regarded as spatially mediated and highly localised. However, unprecedentedly fast technological change coupled with the intensification of...

This paper explains the build-up and reversal of euro area macroeconomic imbalances by considering the interaction between the underlying income distribution in each country and EMU-induced financial liberalization. The argument is that the sharp increase in money supply since the early 1990s...

Despite a significant amount of research, literature continues to produce contrasting predictions on how, and when, public bureaucracies may enhance or constrain policy effectiveness. On the one hand, developmental state research has stressed the importance of bureaucrats' autonomy from...