The article examines the issue of labour share convergence between Western Europe (EU15) and Central and Eastern Europe (EU11). The results of our research show that for the period of 2009-2018, the convergence of labour share between the EU11 and the EU15 at the aggregate level was almost 40%....

With a demonstrated resilience to the crisis and the recovery gaining strength, macroeconomic policies should aim at preserving stability and complementing structural reforms that address long-standing challenges. A medium-term plan to rebuild buffers, support potential growth, and target...

This study aimed to analyse the stock market capitalisation and financial growth nexus of Western European countries from 1989 to 2018 in order to understand the interactive relationship between the stock market and the economy to identify the specifc financial market channels through which...

In light of recent EU policy initiatives such as the Capital Markets Union (CMU) action plan, this working paper provides unique insights from Venture Capital (VC) general partners/management companies, Private Equity Mid-Market (PE MM) managers and Business Angels (BA). Specifically, based on...

Recent theories of the Long Divergence between Middle Eastern and Western European economies focus on Middle Eastern (over-)reliance on religious legitimacy, use of slave soldiers, and persistence of restrictive proscriptions of religious (Islamic) law. These theories take as exogenous the...

This paper investigates the effects of automation and offshoring on the dynamics of the occupational distribution of employment with a focus on Western Europe between 2000 and 2016. I use a general equilibrium model with three regions, three types of workers, ICT capital, trade in final goods...

This paper examines business cycles theoretically and empirically, with a quantitative study based on experience over the long run and in a cross section of countries. Several major questions in business cycle theory are explored. Theoretical concerns indicate that the properties of business...

The intention of this research is to provide more evidence related to women entrepreneurs by selecting an unexplored sample coming from two different regions: The Middle East and the Western Europe countries. It aims to explore the profile of women entrepreneurs and to further investigate the...

While Americans are less healthy than Europeans along some dimensions (like obesity), Americans are significantly less likely to smoke than their European counterparts. This difference emerged in the 1970s and it is biggest among the most educated. The puzzle becomes larger once we account for...

We exploit homogeneous firm level data of manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors to study the impact of firing restrictions on job flow dynamics across 14 European countries. We find that more stringent firing laws dampen the response of job destruction to the cycle, thus making job...

This paper outlines a set of economic criteria to assess an immigrant receiving country's immigration policy from three perspectives. These three perspectives include the resident population, the immigrant and the sending country viewpoints. An expanded version of Julian Simon's financial...

Within the course of the 20th century the American population went through a metamorphosis from being the tallest in the world, to being among the most overweight. The American height advantage over Western and Northern Europeans was between 3 and 9 cm in the middle of the 19th century....

What determines citizens' satisfaction with the "constitution in operation"? We make two contributions towards an answer to this important policy question. First, we place stronger emphasis than existing studies on quantitative interpretations of the importance of different factors. We use...

To explain the rise in the college wage premium in developed economies in the past decades, the present paper examines the effects of technological progress on workers' effort incentives, which determine the effective labor supply. Five effort incentive effects of technological progress are...

The goal of this paper is to establish if unemployment insurance policies are more generous in Europe than in the United States, and by how much. We take the examples of France and one particular American state, Ohio, and use the methodology of Pallage, Scruggs and Zimmermann (2008) to find a...

The flat income tax has become increasingly popular recently, yet its implementation is limited to Eastern Europe. We analyse the distributional and efficiency effects of flat tax scenarios for Western European countries. Our simulations show that flat tax rates required to attain revenue...

Recent theories of the Long Divergence between Middle Eastern and Western European economies focus on Middle Eastern (over-)reliance on religious legitimacy, use of slave soldiers, and persistence of restrictive proscriptions of religious (Islamic) law. These theories take as exogenous the...

This paper investigates the economic and health risks arising from the COVID-19 pandemic for migrant workers in the European Union. It first assesses migrants' economic and health vulnerabilities using ex ante measures based on both supply and demand shocks. The analysis finds that immigrants...

How does a country's economic geography evolve along the development path? This paper documents recent employment growth in 18,961 regions in eight of the world's main economies. Overall, market potential is losing importance, and local density is gaining importance, as correlates of local...

I argue in this paper for more interaction between economic history and economic development. Both subfields study economic development; the difference is that economic history focuses on high-wage countries while economic development focuses on low-wage economies. My argument is based on recent...

This paper documents the migrant-to-native gap in political preferences towards redistribution, restriction on gay rights, European integration, immigration policy, and political trust using repeated cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey. At the country level, our findings reveal...

This paper describes broad regional and temporal trends in the evolution of international trade and international factor flows between 1700 and 1870, including key differences in trade costs across space and time. We find trade links in Western Europe and the European colonies of North America...

This study revisits the trade and welfare effects of 19th century bilateralism exploiting the latest developments in structural gravity models, including the consideration of domestic trade. Using bilateral trade data between 1855 and 1875, I show that the Cobden-Chevalier network, i.e. a system...

In this study we reconstruct the Balkan countries’ monetary relations with Western Europe in the period of the Latin Monetary Union (LMU), particularly from 1867 to 1912. We concentrate on the complex puzzle of LMU and its relations with the Balkans within the theoretical framework of...

We use over 250 years of conflict and market integration data to provide the first quantitative evidence that Atlantic trade contributed to Europe's pacification between 1640 and 1896. While the decline in conflict in Europe during this period has been well documented, the role of Atlantic trade...

We find that bond issues increased substantially since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in calendar week 12 (March 16-20) for bonds rated A or higher, but surprisingly also for bonds rated BBB or lower. In contrast to existing evidence on bond maturities in economic downturns, we document that...

In a world full of studies dealing with the relationship of price-to-earnings ratio and the dividend payout ratio, rarely noticeable are those examining the possibility that this relationship may be non-linear. Although rare, studies that aim to fill this gap focus solely on the US capital...

This paper describes broad regional and temporal trends in the evolution of international trade and international factor flows between 1700 and 1870, including key differences in trade costs across space and time. We find trade links in Western Europe and the European colonies of North America...

It is generally accepted that Western Europe's exceptional economic performance in the so-called "Golden Age" (1950-73) was primarily due to a catch-up process as countries combined their surplus labour with imported American technology to (partially) close the gap in per capita incomes with the...

This paper explores the commuting behavior of workers in Western European countries, with a focus on the differences in commuting time between employees and the self-employed in these countries. Using data from the last wave of the European Working Conditions Survey (2015), we analyze the...

We study whether the positive effects of homeownership on political participation and social capital, found in developed market economies, extend to post-communist countries. We use the privatization of publicly-owned housing in post-communist countries as an exogenous source of variation of...