Distance related variables typically vary in a cross-section dimension but less so in a time dimension across cities, regions, or countries. The enlargement of the EU or the introduction of the euro, however, can be looked upon as integration shocks that are informative of the consequences of...

Economic activity tends to cluster. This results in productivity gains. For policy makers this offers an opportunity to formulate and promote policies that foster clustering of economic activity. Paradoxically, although agglomeration rents are often found in empirical research a rationale for...

This paper applies different copulas in order to investigate the complex dependence structure between EU emission allowance (EUA) futures returns and those of other commodities, equity and energy indices. The analysis yields important insights into the relationship between carbon, commodities...

With the availability of international value added trade data it has become evident that gross export data and value added data do not provide the same information. Although gross exports crosses national borders and is the target of trade policy, value added data tell us what fragment in the...

Using a rich data set on the EU regions, we analyze the relevance of two possible determinants of a region's resilience to shocks, the degree of urbanization and specialization. We take the Great Recession, the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, as our shock and then analyze how...

This paper is concerned with carbon price volatility and the underlying causes of large price movements in the European emissions trading market. Based on the application of a combined jump-GARCH model the behavior of EUA prices is characterized. The jump-GARCH model explains the unsteady carbon...

In the European Union, energy markets are increasingly being liberalized. A case in point is the European natural gas industry. The general expectation is that more competition will lead to lower prices and higher volumes, and hence higher welfare. This paper indicates that this might not happen...

In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We...

This paper proposes a new measure for the evaluation of financial market efficiency, the so-called intermittency coefficient. This is a multifractality measure that can quantify the deviation from a random walk within the framework of the multifractal random walk model by Bacry et al. (2001b)....