Since the middle of the 1980s many European countries have reduced the strictness of their employment protection mainly by relaxing it for temporary jobs. These countries are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The article explores the...

Adaptation to climate change is gaining increasing relevance in the public debate of climate policy. However, detailed and regionalised cost estimates as a basis for cost-benefit-analyses are rare. We compose available cost estimates for adaptation in Europe, and in particular Germany, Finland...

In the current debate on the reasons and implications of the Greek and Irish euro crisis, the intra-European current account imbalances have gained rising attention. Whereas Greece and Ireland struggle for austerity in private and public spending, Germany is urged to reduce its current account...

Using high-frequency transaction data for the three largest European markets (France, Germany and Italy), this paper documents the existence of an asymmetric relationship between market liquidity and trading imbalances: when quoted spreads rise (fall) and liquidity falls (increases) buy (sell)...

The paper discusses key elements of optimal central bank design and applies its findings to the Eurosystem. A particular focus is on the size of monetary policy committees, the degree of centralization, and the representation of relative economic size in the voting rights of regional (or...

This paper considers the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate function is...

Daily data from the German and U.S. equity markets before and after the introduction of the Euro are used to study the effect of exchange rate regime choices on equity markets. It is found that, since the introduction of the Euro, the volatility and the persistence of the German stock index have...

This paper examines how the pass-through of monetary policy measures in 6 EMU countries has evolved over time and whether there is convergence in monetary transmission. The countries included are: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and the sample period is 1980-2000. We...