Despite its rather broad goal of promoting 'economic, social and territorial cohesion', the existing literature has mainly focused on investigating the Cohesion Policy's growth effects. This ignores the fact that part of the EU expenditures is directly aimed at reducing disparities in the...

The government's choices of the corporate tax rate and public investment are interdependent. In particular, they both respond positively to the other. Therefore, international tax competition not only drives corporate tax rates to lower levels but might also affect negatively the stock of public...

This paper provides evidence on the role of net fiscal transfers to households and EU structural funds for per-capita output convergence across a large sample of European regions during the period 1995-2005. We find that net fiscal transfers, while achieving regional redistribution, seem to...

We study how public policy can contribute to increase the share of early stage and high-tech venture capital investments, thus helping the development of active venture capital markets. A simple extension of the seminal model by Holmstrom and Tirole (1997) provides a theoretical base for our...

The prevalence of either Ricardian or non-Ricardian fiscal regimes is important both for practical policy reasons and to assess fiscal sustainability, and this is of particular relevance for European Union countries. The purpose of this paper is to assess, with a panel data set, the empirical...

In order to assess the existence of expansionary fiscal consolidations in Europe, panel data models for private consumption are estimated for the EU15 countries, using annual data over the period 1970–2005. Three alternative approaches to determine fiscal episodes are used, and the level of...

This paper provides evidence on the role of non-base wage components as a channel for firms to adjust labour costs in the event of adverse shocks. It uses data from a firm-level survey for 25 European countries that covers the period 2010-2013. We find that firms subject to nominal wage...

Using annual data from 14 European Union countries, plus Canada, Japan and the United States, we evaluate the macroeconomic effects of public and private investment through VAR analysis. From impulse response functions, we are able to assess the extent of crowding-in or crowding-out of both...

We assess the fiscal behaviour in the European Union countries for the period 1990-2005 via the responsiveness of budget balances to several determinants. The results show that the existence of effective fiscal rules, the degree of public spending decentralization, and the electoral cycle can...

It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. We...