There is a wide consensus that the existence of structural rigidities in the Eurozone reduces the effectiveness of the ECB's monetary policies. In order to test this "ECB-handicap" hypothesis, we perform a meta-analysis of the effects of monetary policies in the US and the Eurozone countries....

Using data from the 2006 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes how a minimum wage affects employment, wage inequality, public expenditures, and aggregate income in the low-wage sector. It is shown that a statutory minimum wage of EUR 7.50 per hour would cost...

Using data from more than 100 economies for the period of 1975 to 2005, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the determinants of international reserve holdings. Four groups of determinants, namely, traditional macro variables, financial variables, institutional variables, and dummy...

Civil war is often caused by poverty, and further demolishes existing capital. Such a vicious circle is detrimental for economic development of countries experiencing civil war. Civil war may also contribute to creative destructions of traditional economic, social and political system, leading...

Do minimum wages reduce in-work-poverty and wage inequality? Or can alternative policies do better? We evaluate theses issues for the exemplary case of Germany that suffers from high unemployment among low-skilled workers and rising wage dispersion at the bottom of the wage distribution. We...

In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to rely on Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions in their struggle against the spread of the virus. The stringency of the lockdowns differed across space and time as governments had to adjust their strategy dynamically to the country-specific...

Millions of people refuse COVID-19 vaccination. Using original data from two surveys in nine OECD countries, we analyze the determinants of anti-vax intentions in December 2020 and show that half of the anti-vax individuals were vaccinated by summer 2021. Vaccinations were more likely among...

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...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...