This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries’ business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

This paper evaluates the determination of receipts from EU budget by considering a richer institutional structure than in earlier studies. We assume that the member states have self-interested objectives in CM trying to minimize their contributions within the given framework of the EU budget...

Economic integration, from the European Payments Union and the European Coal and Steel Community to the Common Market, the European Monetary System, the Single Market, and the euro, is one of the most visible, controversial and commented-upon aspects of Europe’s development since the end of...

In models with heterogeneous firms trade integration has a positive impact on aggregate productivity through the selection of the best firms as import competition drives the least productive ones out of the market. To quantify the impact of firm selection on productivity, we calibrate and...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

This paper investigates the motive of geographic risk diversification in the lending activity for bank mergers in the EU on a sample of large banking groups. Geographic diversification should allow banks to reduce their risk. We observe that the loan portfolios of European banks are home-biased....

The paper analyses the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the EU's Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal...

The present paper applies a gravity model with fixed country effects to M&A flows on a sample of 1215 pairs of countries over the 1998-2001 period, to test the impact of European integration. That model, which had to our knowledge not been applied to M&A flows so far, allows us to observe that...

This paper looks at the performance record of M&As that took place in the European Union financial industry in the period 1998-2002. First, the paper reports evidence on shareholder returns from the merger. Merger announcements implied positive excess returns to the shareholders of the target...

This paper explores the dominant role of politics in decisions made by euro area governments during the crisis. Decisions that appear to have been driven by local political considerations to the detriment of the euro area as a whole are discussed. The domination of politics over economics has...