Trade liberalization is often met with sharp opposition. Recent examples include the so-called ‘Bolkestein’ directive, which allows service providers from a given EU member to temporarily work in another member country. One way to view such a reform is that it simply widens the range of...

The radical liberalization of foreign trade in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 has been a key part of the economic reform and has been accompanied by a full-scale geographical reorientation of international trade from East to West. Increased trade with the EU has been associated with...

This is a case study of how a country nearly reached bankruptcy in March 2013, within five years from entering the Eurozone. The magnitude of the requested assistance is extremely large relative to GDP (100%) and studying this event provides useful lessons for avoiding such crises in the future....

The paper applies a gravity model to 1980-1996 annual non-fuel imports data for 58 countries to quantify the effects of recently created or revamped PTAs on trade. We modify the usual gravity equation to identify separate effects of PTAs on intra-bloc trade, members' total imports and their...

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...

The decision-making rules of the European Union (EU) are defined in an incomplete contract signed by 15 national governments. The design of the contract defines the set of policy issues where it applies – in decision-making rules i.e. the majority rules and the division of powers among the...

The European Monetary Union will involve socialization of existing seigniorage wealth of national central banks. This socialization will create windfall gains for countries with relatively low monetary bases such as France and the United Kingdom and will be disadvantageous for countries like...

Based on a modified Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Model (STAR), we analyze whether borders still constitute significant impediments to labor market integration in the European Union, despite the formal law of free movement of labor. Using regional data from the EU-15 countries over 21 years, we...

It is often suggested that "European economic and monetary integration is important because people think it is". This paper is an exploratory attempt to formalize this idea. As the basis for our investigation, we rely on recent analysis by Krugman (1989) and Matsuyama (1989), which addresses the...