In this study, we approximate the financial cycle in Europe by combining potential common and relevant financial indicators. We consider different credit aggregates and asset prices but also incorporate banking sector indicators for 11 European countries. We develop seven different synthetic...

Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose an ex-post accounting framework...

This paper examines the house price dynamics for thirteen European countries. A Markov-switching error correction model is estimated on house price returns at the country level, with deviations between house prices and fundamentals feeding into the short-run dynamics. The system is assumed to be...

The paper develops an early-warning model for predicting vulnerabilities leading to distress in European banks using both bank and country-level data. As outright bank failures have been rare in Europe, the paper introduces a novel dataset that complements bankruptcies and defaults with state...

The harmonized European value-added tax (VAT) is anything but a modern consumption tax that taxes all goods and services at a uniform rate. As exemplified by an analysis of the Dutch version, some 60% of the base is exempted, that is, not taxed on output but on inputs. This has serious...

The European higher education landscape has become increasingly integrated causing competition among universities that is no longer bound to national borders. In view of this development, the present paper investigates the relative efficiency of 450 European universities between 2011 and 2014....

Lobbying can provide policy makers with important sector-specific information and thereby facilitating informed decisions. If going far beyond this, in particular if successfully influencing policy makers to unnecessarily tighten regulation or not opening already excessively regulated markets,...