Despite the proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs) between nations today, academics and policy makers alike have yet to fully understand why trading nations actively pursue free trade agreements. With what aim do governments enter into an FTA? In this paper, we propose that the...

Unionists and politicians frequently claim that globalization lowers employment protection of workers. This paper tests this hypothesis in a panel of 28 OECD countries from 1985 to 2003, differentiating between three dimensions of globalization and two labor market segments. While overall...

A source of anxiety of policy makers and the public in general is the detrimental impact of trade and immigration on unemployment. The transitory restrictions for worker migration after the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007 exemplify the supposed negative effect of immigration on labor markets....

In the process of furthering EU integration little attention was given to the role of income taxes. Multiple income tax systems exist across the Union and their differentiation negatively impacts the European labour market, investments and savings, inhibiting economic growth. Individual nations...

The determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) are explored with gravity models, using a Poisson estimator and a linear estimator, both with fixed effects. The heterogeneity of product market regulations has a large and robust impact on cross-border investment: a reduction of regulatory...

Die anhaltende Eurokrise, die sich in einer deutlich schlechteren Konjunkturlage in Europa als in den USA spiegelt, hat nicht zuletzt ihre Ursache in der nach wie vor schleppenden Umsetzung der Reformen des Finanzsektors. Während die Lücken in der wirtschaftspolitischen Architektur der WWU...

In the wake of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations to the global public, and despite an unimpeded cross-border data flow and knowledge transfer being a pre-requisite for the development of the digital economy, governments around the world are increasingly tending to...

This report looks at procedures and processes related to non-tariff measures in agricultural trade. Based on the prior that countries are likely to make efforts to reduce the trade hindering effects of domestic food regulation within regional trade agreements, we focus on three different RTAs,...

Several studies have reported a large negative effect of national borders on the volume of trade. We provide new estimates of the border effect for continental Europe using road rather than great circle – or “as-crows-fly” – distance. Road distances for 48 180 European city pairs have...