Advanced economies have been witnessing a pronounced slowdown of productivity growth since the global financial crisis that is accompanied in recent years by a withdrawal from trade integration processes. We study the determinants of productivity slowdown over the past two decades in four...

This paper describes the institutional changes that have induced a decline in the vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) - defined as the share of sub-national own spending not financed through own revenues - in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Norway, and Spain. The decline in VFI was achieved...

This paper proposes a stochastic volatility model to measure sovereign financial distress. It examines how key European sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads affect each other; specifically, the paper analyses the volatility structure of Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal....