Das Papier wendet sich an die Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer der EU-Reformdebatte. Ich schlage vor, die im Weißbuch der Kommission zur Zukunft Europas angemahnte Debatte nicht auf die politischen Kompetenzen der EU zu verengen. Stattdessen sollten jene Einschränkungen politischer...

An empirical measure of trade openness is defined as the ratio of total trade to GDP, and represents a convenient variable routinely used for cross-country studies on a variety of issues. However, the effects that the crude measure captures remain ambiguous, making it difficult to interpret the...

This paper contributes to the EU reform debate that the Commission started with its white paper on the future of Europe. I suggest that we should not only pay attention to the political competences of the EU, but also focus on the restriction of the political room for manoeuvre which derives...

The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with trade in goods and labor mobility across countries to study and quantify the economic...

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation members had proposed the establishment of an Islamic Common Market among themselves in the early 1970s. This notion currently listed among the core objectives of the Organization and, to this end, the members adopted the TPS agreement in 1990. This study...

This paper examines global and regional stock market integration in Asia at both the aggregate and disaggregate (industry) level by applying the Phillips-Sul (2007) tests for panel and club convergence. The main findings can be summarised as follows. In the pre-2008 crisis period, no...

The authors consider a symmetric model composed of two countries and a firm in each country. Firms produce the same good by means of a polluting technology which uses fossil energy. However, these firms can adopt clean technology which uses renewable energy, having lower costs. Interestingly,...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

A recurring argument in the global debate is that climate deterioration is likely to make social conflicts over diminishing natural resources more common in the future. The exact mechanism behind such a development has so far not been successfully characterized in the literature. In this paper,...

In what sense are institutions a deep determinant of growth? In this paper, we address this question by examining the relationship between city growth and institutional reform in 19th century Germany, when some cities experienced deep institutional reform as a result of French rule. Employing an...

This paper examines the predictability of a range of international stock markets where we allow the presence of both local and global predictive factors. Recent research has argued that US returns have predictive power for international stock returns. We expand this line of research, following...

The diffusion of renewable energy in the power system implies high supply variability. Lacking economically viable storage options, renewable energy integration has so far been possible thanks to the presence of fast-reacting mid-merit fossil-based technologies, which act as back-up capacity....

This paper compares the dynamics of the financial integration process as described by different empirical approaches. To this end, a wide range of measures accounting for several dimensions of integration is employed. In addition, we evaluate the performance of each measure by relying on an...

We analyze differences in the pricing of syndicated loans between U.S. and European loans. For credit lines, U.S. borrowers pay significantly higher spreads, but also lower fees, resulting in similar total costs of borrowing in both markets. For term loans, U.S. firms pay significantly higher...

Do migrant parents change their labor market behavior when their children are born with the citizenship of the host country? In this study, I implement a difference-in-discontinuities approach to examine possible adjustments in employment and working hours following the introduction of...