The authors discuss recent pension reforms aimed at prolonging working lives in the 27 member states of the European Union. Indeed, in the framework of the so-called Open Method of coordination, member countries have agreed on a set of common policy objectives concerning social protection...

This paper focuses on roots of strain in the European Monetary Union (EMU). It argues that there is need for a thorough reform of the governance structure of the Union in conjunction with radical changes in the regulation and supervision of financial markets. Financial intermediation has gone...

Since the intensification of the crisis in September 2008, all euro area long-term government bond yields relative to the German Bund have been characterized by highly persistent processes with upward trends for countries with weaker fiscal fundamentals. Looking at the daily period 1 September...

The survey based monthly US ISM production index and Eurozone manufacturing PMI output index provide early information on industrial output growth before the release of the official industrial production index. I use the Carlson and Parkin probability method to construct monthly growth estimates...

Overall, state owned enterprises (SOEs) – this paper considers enterprises in which the government is at least a major blockholder as state owned – have played and still play an important role in several jurisdictions all over the world. But in the course of the last two or three decades...

The article deals with the information obligations of policyholders, insurers and insurance intermediaries in European Insurance Contract Law. It provides a comparative overview of the pertaining national rules and sheds light on existing European Union regulation in the field

This paper attempts to determine whether or not the introduction of the euro affected the volatility of bilateral exchange rates all over the world. To that end, we examine the exchange rate behaviour for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries during the 1993-2007 period. Two econometric methods...

I use a Bayesian vector autoregressive (VAR) model to investigate the impact of monetary and technology shocks on the euro area stock market in 1987-2005. I find an important role for technology shocks, but not monetary shocks, in explaining variations in real stock prices. The identification...

In this paper, we investigate whether there is a relationship between earnings and capital management and the adoption of the October 2008 IAS 39 amendment using a sample of 71 publicly traded bank holding companies in the main European markets. We demonstrate the new reclassification...

The present article discusses remedies for coordinated effects under the EU Merger Regulation. To this end, it is divided in three parts. Part I reviews the remedies applied to date by the Commission in coordinated effects cases (I). Part II discusses the substantive standard against which such...