This paper deals with the implications of natural resources for the conduct of economic policies and the role and design of institutions in resource-rich countries. The paper briefly reviews the experience of a few resource-rich countries, highlighting the successes of those that have done well...

Major economic reforms have been carried through in Sweden during the last two decades. Most of the reforms have been made in response to long-standing rather than to acute problems. There has usually been a strong perception among economists, policy makers and the general public of the problems...

Although widely regarded as a textbook case of a rigid economy, in the late 1990s France was able to increase employment by 10 per cent within five years and to cut down unemployment by more than a fourth. This paper investigates what factors may account for this surprising performance. The...

We study the GDPR's opt-in requirement in a model with a firm that provides a digital service and consumers who are heterogeneous in their valuations of the firm's service as well as the privacy costs incurred when sharing personal data with the firm. We show that the GDPR boosts demand for the...

This paper examines the responses of private consumption, residential investment, and business investment in 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

This article focuses on the role of labour market institutions in explaining different labour market developments in European countries, with a special attention to the new European Union member countries. This may allow us to analyse effects of various institutional setups and of their changes...