To investigate how Covid-19 is shaping the way Europeans think about institutions, we conducted a large online survey experiment during the first wave of the epidemic (June). With a randomised survey ow we varied whether respondents are given Covid-related treatment questions first, before...

This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock returns, CDS and economic activity in the US and the five European countries (the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) which have been most affected. The sample period covers the dates from the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in...

We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pandemic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Exploiting within-country variation, we show that a one standard deviation increase in social capital leads to...

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....

We estimate a Ricardian model of Western European agricultural land values using farm-level data. We model the effect of temperature on land values using a flexible specification of daily mean temperature to test if there are temperature threshold effects. Results indicate that there are no...

The objective of this paper is to explain populist attitudes that are prevailing in a number of European democracies. Populist attitudes expectedly lead to social protests and populist votes. We capture the populist wave by relying not on voting behavior but rather on values that are...

This paper examines persistence, structural breaks and non-linearities in the case of five European stock market indices, namely the FTSE100 (UK), DAX30 (Germany), CAC40 (France), IBEX35 (Spain) and FTSE MIB40 (Italy), using fractional integration methods. The empirical results provide no...