Despite substantial differences in monetary policy and communication strategies, many central banks share the practice of purdah, a self-imposed guideline of abstaining from communication around policy meetings or other important events. This practice is remarkable, as it seems to contradict the...

We examine gender differences in career progression and promotions in central banking, a stereotypical male-dominated occupation, using confidential anonymized personnel data from the European Central Bank (ECB) during the period 2003-2017. A wage gap emerges between men and women within a few...

This paper analyses the rapid trade integration of the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC's) with the euro area in the past ten years and draws implications for further integration. We use as benchmark an enhanced gravity model estimated for a large sample of bilateral trade flows...

This paper examines whether European regions which incorporate banks with a higher intermediation quality grow faster and are more resilient to negative shocks than its less efficient peers. For this purpose, we measure a bank's intermediation quality by estimating its profit and cost efficiency...

Lobbying can provide policy makers with important sector-specific information and thereby facilitating informed decisions. If going far beyond this, in particular if successfully influencing policy makers to unnecessarily tighten regulation or not opening already excessively regulated markets,...

Research on interbank networks and systemic importance is starting to recognise that the web of exposures linking banks balance sheets is more complex than the single-layer-of-exposure approach. We use data on exposures between large European banks broken down by both maturity and instrument...

We provide the first cross-country evidence of the effect of investment by private equity firms on innovation, focusing on a sample of European countries and using Kortum and Lerner's (2000) empirical methodology. Using an 18-country panel covering the period 1991-2004, we study how private...

While there are many methods to measure the competitiveness of an economy, most of these concepts ignore the fact that competitiveness can change because of market processes like wage negotiation but also because of political decision-making. Governments that compete with others for factors of...