The euro area will not have a centralised budget and smoothing of country-specific asymmetric shocks via private financial markets will develop only slowly. Mistrust among the governments has caused rigid, even pro-cyclical fiscal policies. Smoothing mechanisms are absent due to the fear that...

Preparations are underway to revise national accounting to implement actuarial recording of pension liabilities for corporations and government as an employer. This paper extends this to unfunded public pensions with the help of "implicit tax" in pension contributions. The clearest advantages of...

In welfare states, collective saving has declined to a persistently negative level, while reduced fertility and increasing longevity are leading to increasing pension liabilities. Actuarial neutrality across generations is presented as a benchmark for designing pension reforms to meet the...

Using the 2019 ECS, we investigate the relationship between union organization, workplace representation, industrial relations quality and strike incidence. We also consider some six issues behind the most recent instances of industrial action or threatened industrial action and their outcomes....

Using a cross section of matched data from the employee and management questionnaires of the European Company Survey, this paper investigates the determinants of worker commitment and the potential contribution of commitment to establishment performance. An index of worker commitment is...

In this paper, sound public finances under the euro means sustainability in the long term instead of short- and medium-term fiscal discipline. The challenges to sustainability are identified for the four largest euro area member states, and several policy options for sustainability are...

Cross-country data are used to establish perceived shortfalls in employee involvement based on the responses of employee representatives in EU establishments with formal workplace employee representation. The desire for greater involvement is smaller where workplace representation is via works...

Output gaps (OG) identify economic cycles and the cyclical and structural components in government budget balances. A new simple method for estimating OGs is presented here. The new results are more transparent than those published by the leading economic policy institutions. - The retroactive...

Using cross-country data, this paper investigates the relationship between workplace representation and strikes. Works councils are associated with reduced strike activity. However, where union members make up a majority of works councillors, such union-dominated councils experience greater...