This contribution develops a blueprint for a European fiscal union. The proposal addresses the shortcomings of most other reform designs which do not offer a solution for insolvent or noncooperative euro countries. We suggest a design which combines fiscal insurance with an orderly procedure to...

We study fair and efficient tax-benefit schemes based on income and non-income factors under partial control. Partial control means that each factor is a specific mixture of unobserved ability (randomly drawn by nature) and effort (chosen by individuals who differ in tastes). Factors differ in...

We analyze different alternatives how a common unemployment insurance system for the euro area (EA) could be designed and assess their effectiveness to act as an insurance device in the presence of asymmetric macroeconomic shocks. Running counterfactual simulations based on micro data for the...

Corporate scientific publications are often presented as a strategic means for firms to create prior art with the objective to prevent others from patenting related inventions. This presumes that corporate publications enter the pool of prior art which is relevant to judge the novelty of patent...

There is a growing literature that aims at assessing the private value of knowledge assets and patents. It has been shown that patents and their quality as measured by citations received by future patents contribute significantly to the market value of firms beyond their R&D stocks. This paper...

Firm acquisitions have been shown to serve as a way to gain access to international markets, technological assets, products or other valuable resources of the target firm. Given this heterogeneity of takeover motivations and the skewness of the distribution of the deal value we show whether and...

The 2008-09 crisis has shown that some euro area member countries were unable to sufficiently stabilize their economies which has given rise to a debate about deeper fiscal integration in Europe. In this paper, we analyze the redistributive and stabilizing effects of two scenarios of fiscal...

In this paper, we present the first dynamic scoring exercise linking a multi‐country microsimulation and DSGE models for all countries of the European Union. We illustrate our novel methodology analysing a hypothetical tax reform for Belgium. We then evaluate real tax reforms in Italy and...