This article studies the likely impact of unconventional gas developments in the U.S. on EU competitiveness. We find, first of all, little evidence for a prosperous unconventional gas development in Europe. Second, the U.S. boom has already a strong impact on both world and European energy...

The objective of this paper is to gain insights into the relationship between deficit-reducing policies and the evolution of the debt/GDP ratio. We consider past events of fiscal consolidation in a selected group of EU countries, by using the new data set recently made available by Devries et...

Greece has reached a point where, under any plausible macroeconomic scenario, public debt will continue growing faster than GDP. Fiscal consolidation alone cannot close the solvency gap. A substantial reduction in the stock of debt is needed. Even post-debt restructuring, there is no guarantee...

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...

This paper estimates Nash-type fiscal reaction functions for European governments competing for revenue from diesel excises. It appears that European governments strategically set their excise levels by responding to their neighbors' tax rates. This provides evidence for the presence of tax...

The mobility of labor reduces national incentives to invest in internationally applicable education. The European Union could overcome this by allowing member states to institute graduate taxes or income-contingent loans, collected also from migrants. This paper presents calculations on how a...

The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union (EU) initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers,...

This paper proposes an analysis of two major tax events which occurred in the European Union in 2001, the move of Germany from imputation to exemption and the objective announced by the EU Commission to provide EU businesses with a consolidated corporate tax base for their EU-wide activities. In...

This paper qualifies the view of pronounced overpricing of sovereign bonds for the so-called GIIPS countries during the financial crisis. We use annual data for 21 OECD countries from 1980 to 2012. As opposed to related studies, our data set allows us to contrast the pricing of macroeconomic...

This paper characterises rules-based fiscal policy setting. Basically, we translate a standard monetary policy rule into a simple fiscal policy rule. We then infer on fiscal policymakers' reaction coefficients by testing the rule with GMM. Interaction is also tested directly by the inclusion of...