We study the impact of the 2015 mass arrival of refugees to Germany on residential housing rents. Using unique data on end of year county-level refugee populations and data on monthly offers of flats for rent from Germany’s leading online property broker Immobilienscout24, we find strong...

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...

Using data from 1,226 matches played over 18 seasons, we analyse match attendances in the group stages of the European Rugby Cup (ERC). We find that short-run (match) uncertainty had little effect on attendances. This finding is significant as the ERC has been replaced by a new competition which...

The paper presents results from two natural experiments on the impact of revenue sharing and salary caps on competitive balance in sports leagues arising from the introduction of professionalism in Rugby Union in 1995. The first involves the English Premiership, which traditionally applied a...