For decades, countries aspiring to join the European Union (EU) have been linked to it through migration. Yet little is known about how migration affects individual support for joining the EU in prospective member states. We explore the relationship between migration and support for EU accession...

This paper presents new estimates of the economic benefits from economic and political integration. Using the synthetic counterfactuals method, we estimate how GDP per capita and labour productivity would have behaved for the countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the 1973, 1980s, 1995...

This paper investigates the effects of non-repayable enterprise grants financed from the European Union's Structural and Cohesion Funds on firm outcomes in Hungary using firm- and worker-level information on all rejected and successful grant applications between 2004-2014. In our model, after...

This paper investigates the effects of labour migration and openness to trade on regional skill endowments across the European Union at a time of increased economic integration. Using regional data from Eurostat's Regio database and the open web source Openflight for the period 1998-2010 we test...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

We analyse the evolution of EU citizens' living standards, considering the EU as a single country. Average living standards have improved considerably as the European integration process has unfolded. EU28 income inequality has steadily declined, mostly as a result of the macroeconomic...

This paper studies the labor market effects of out- and in-migration in the context of cross-border commuting. It investigates an EU policy reform that granted Czech citizens full access to the German labor market, resulting in a Czech commuter outflow across the border to Germany. Exploiting...

One of the strongest stylized facts of the transition is also one of the most unexpected: after 1989 Central and Eastern European and Former Soviet Union countries diverged massively. Institutions are a main reason. The EU anchor thesis posits that the prospect of membership in the European...