There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads,...

In this paper we examine the nonlinear relation between the EUA price and its fundamentals, such as energy prices, macroeconomic risk factors and weather conditions. By estimating a Markov regime-switching model, we find that the relation between the EUA price and its fundamentals varies over...

Academic research and policy makers in the Euro area are currently concerned with the threat of debt deflation and secular stagnation in Europe. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that secular stagnation and debt deflation in the Euro area may be rather slowly developing. Yet what appears as...

In the absence of an international agreement on climate policy, unilateral carbon abatement creates two problems: It tends to have a detrimental effect on domestic competitiveness, and it leads to an increase in carbon emissions abroad (leakage). This paper analyses two policies that have...

The Paris Agreement establishes a mechanism to allow a Party to benefit from greenhouse gases emissions reductions conducted in a host Party to fulfil its nationally determined contribution. In this context, the objective of this paper is to improve the understanding of carbon offsets price...

A mechanism to restructure the debt of an insolvent euro country is a missing element in the emerging institutional architecture of the euro area. The introduction of an insolvency proce-dure for sovereigns faces a dilemma: In the foreseeable future, its introduction would risk pushing Europe...

We implement a meta-regression-analysis for the budgetary impact of numerical fiscal rules. Based on 30 studies published in the last decade, we offer a consensus estimate with respect to the level of statistical significance, provide suggestive evidence for the effect size, and identify study...

European banks are exposed to a substantial amount of risky sovereign debt. The “missing bank capital” resulting from the zero-risk weight exemption for European banks for European sovereign debt amplifies the co-movement between sovereign CDS spreads and facilitates cross-border...

The focus of cartel damages law is on the recovery of the cartel overcharge. Parties other than purchasers are often neglected, not only as a matter of judicial practice, but also due to legal restrictions. We argue that a narrow concept of standing—which excludes parties that supply either...

Energy markets and energy-intensive industries in all EU member states - especially in Germany - are subject to a diverse set of policies related to climate change. We analyse the potential efficiency losses from simultaneous application of emission taxes and emissions trading in qualitative and...