France has seen a marked deterioration in its export performance in the last 10 years or so. Previous empirical research pointed out that weak export performance was due to i) vigorous domestic demand; ii) lower mark-ups due to head-to-head competition with Germany; iii) low non-price...

How important is spatial identity in shifting preferences for redistribution? This paper takes advantage of within-country variability in the adoption of a single currency as an instrument to examine the impact of the rescaling of spatial identity in Europe. We draw upon data from the last three...

Mainstream economic research regards private debt as a determinant of GDP growth in the longrun. Levine (2005) surveys in details this branch of literature and explains the channels by which debt fuels growth. In this paper we switch the focus from the long to the short-run and study whether...

Despite sharp reductions in corporate income tax (CIT) rates worldwide, CIT revenues have not fallen dramatically in the last two decades. This paper investigates the recent developments in CIT in the European Union, by taking a closer look at the potential driving forces behind this puzzle....

Does the emigration of skilled individuals necessarily result in losses for source countries due to the brain drain? Combining industry-level patenting and migration data from 32 European countries, we show that emigration in fact positively contributes to innovation in source countries. We use...

Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occurred gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth...

We investigate country heterogeneity in cross-country growth regressions. In contrast to the previous literature that focuses on low-income countries, this study also highlights growth determinants in high-income (OECD) countries. We introduce Iterative Bayesian Model Averaging (IBMA) to address...

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the factors that can cause price levels to diverge and which are at the root of different inflation rates in Europe including the EU-27. Among others, we study the structural and cyclical factors influencing market and non-market-based service, house...

After the eastern enlargement of the European Union due to increasing labor market integration, wage determination and monetary integration in Central and Eastern Europe have become key issues in European economic policy making. Based on the Scandinavian model of wage adjustment by Lindbeck...

We use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to evaluate the robustness of determinants of economic growth in a new dataset of 255 European regions in the 1995-2005 period. We use three different specifications based on (1) the cross-section of regions, (2) the cross-section of regions with country...