The majority of the Member States of the European Union have undertaken remarkably comprehensive welfare and labor market reforms in the years since the 1990s. Many of these reforms, however, have not followed the conventional retrenchment and deregulation recipes, but rather took a liking to...

Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called Bolkestein directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of goods that...

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...

Using the 2008-09 Global financial crisis and the 2012 Euro area sovereign debt crisis as natural experiments, we investigate the effects of contractions in credit supply on R&D spending in a large sample of European firms. Our identification strategy exploits differences in financial...

Using variance decompositions in vector auto-regressions (VARs) we model a high-dimensional network of European CDS spreads to assess the transmission of credit risk to the non-financial corporate sector. Our findings suggest a sectoral clustering in the CDS network, where financial institutions...

Many argue that the rise in populist support in Europe and elsewhere stems from people feeling marginalised, distrustful and generally dissatisfied. Against a backdrop of populism, this paper aims to examine the relationship between social capital and life satisfaction using data on 21,000...

This note examines whether subjective general health in Europe has changed since the onset of the economic crisis. Subjective general health for Ireland, Spain and Portugal is compared before and after the onset of the recession. Two other European economies, Germany and United Kingdom, are also...

The declared intention of policy makers is that future bank restructuring should be conducted through bail-in rather than bail-out. Over the past years there have been a few cases of European banks being restructured where creditors were bailed in. This paper exploits these events to investigate...