Over the past two decades there has been a substantial increase in the mobility of students in Europe, while also research has become much more internationally oriented. In this paper we document changes in the structure of research and higher education in Europe and investigate potential...

We investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings. For both European and U.S. universities, we generate several measures of autonomy, governance, and competition for research funding. We show that university...

Arguably the most important development in recent decades in US factor markets is the decline in the relative wage of the unskilled. By contrast, in Europe it is undoubtedly the rise and persistence of unemployment. Technology has been identified as a key reason for the rising US wage...

In the aftermath of World War II, the world's economies exhibited very different rates of economic recovery. We provide evidence that those countries that caught up the most with the U.S. in the postwar period are those that also saw an acceleration in the speed of adoption of new technologies....

We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a 'political replacement effect'. Innovations often erode elites' incumbency advantage, increasing the likelihood that they will be replaced. Fearing replacement, political elites...

According to conventional wisdom, a fiscal consolidation is likely to contract real aggregate demand. It has often been argued, however, that this conclusion is misleading as it neglects the role of expectations of future policy: if the fiscal consolidation is read by the private sector as a...

Over the last three decades, differential national regulation in conjunction with increasing capital mobility has given rise to tremendous growth in the Eurocurrency markets. In this paper, we analyze whether the announced plans of the European Commuission to remove barriers to capital flows (in...

In this paper, based on the experience of ten European countries, we study the relevance of seigniorage revenues in the recent past, and we speculate about their importance in the near future. We find that the members of the European community differ widely in the way they manage monetary...

Monetary policies in the U.S., Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom over the period 1973-1986 are compared and evaluated, with the aim of drawing lessons for monetary policy from the recent historical record. All four countries shifted during this period to money targeting, though with...

Casual observation indicates that in recent years real interest rates in the United States appear to have risen sharply and have remained high relative to historical standards. Many observers have claimed that these high real rates have been transmitted abroad and have lead to high real rates in...