Under what conditions can the European Neighbourhood Policy achieve one of its main objectives: to resolve conflicts in the European Union's neighbourhood? In the spirit of Montesquieu and Monnet, the basic hypothesis of the EU is that closer economic integration encourages governments to take...

The recent increase of interest rate spreads in Europe and their apparent detachment from underlying fundamental variables has generated a debate on multiple equilibria in the sovereign bond market (see De Grauwe and Ji (2012)). We critically evaluate this hypothesis, by pointing towards an...

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically in some of the euro area member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and...

The Single Supervisory Mechanism was introduced to eliminate the common-pool problem and limit uncontrolled lending by national central banks (NCBs). We analyze its effectiveness. Second, we model how, by forbearing and providing refinancing credit, NCBs avoid domestic resolution costs and,...

In a major setback for the EU, only two of four Eastern Partnership countries actually initialed Association Agreements at the Vilnius Summit in November 2013. This paper asks what went wrong and what can be done about it. Using a gravity model to estimate the effects of deep and shallow free...

In the winter 2011/12 a wave of internal capital flight prompted the ECB to abandon its exit strategy and to announce an unprecedented monetary expansion. We analyze this episode in several dimensions: (i) by providing an event-study analysis covering key variables from national central banks'...

Since Jean Monnet conceived the Coal and Steel Community, free trade has successfully prevented serious conflicts in Europe between democratically governed States with market economies. After six countries established the European Community, this principle has been extended successfully to its...

Most of the time, crises precede constitutions. Following a brief review of relevant historical background, this article aims to show why Iceland, after its financial collapse in 2008, is now at last on the road to adopting a new constitution to replace the provisional constitution from 1944....

The paper discusses the European Union as a union of primarily small European states, a union whose parallel emphasis on efficiency and fairness, including deep respect for human rights, holds the key to Europe's economic and social advances over the years. The paper shows that adjusting...