We address empirically trust as a determinant of support for government intervention. The central notion provided in the present paper is that the influence of generalized social trust on intervention attitudes is conditional on the perceived reliability, honesty, and incorruptibility of state...

Which impact does government size have on life satisfaction, and how do effects of bigger government differ between income groups in society? Previous studies typically employed country averages and thus neglect possibly heterogeneous happiness effects between income groups. The paper addresses...

The Euro Plus Pact was approved by 23 EU countries in March 2011 and came into force shortly afterwards. The Pact stipulates a range of quantitative targets meant to strengthen cost competitiveness with the aim of preventing the accumulation of external financial imbalances. This paper uses...

The overall aim of this study is to investigate energy transition processes in rural areas by paying particular attention to the role of energy cooperatives in these processes. The study should mainly uncover, if and under which conditions energy cooperatives provide favourable structures for...

The paper examines the effects of asymmetries in fiscal policy conduct upon the correlation of business cycles in the European Union. In particular the paper estimates the effects of fiscal indiscipline and dissimilarity on business cycle correlation in the period 1996-2012 using a panel of 27...

Industrial policy is back on the agenda and the consensus is that it must be different 'this time' from the past. We redefine industrial policy for industrialised countries as a strategy to promote 'high-road competitiveness', understood as the ability of an economy to achieve 'Beyond-GDP'...

The paper investigates a central hypothesis of the green economy concept, which states that transitioning to a low-carbon economy is justified on a sound economic basis. We analyze this hypothesis by focussing on employment effects from renewable energy deployment, based on an evaluation of 23...

This report collects and draws conclusions from research papers of Area 1. It summarises the results against the background of the existing literature, focusing in particular on the challenges arising on welfare states from globalisation, post-industrialisation, and demographic changes. The...