This paper surveys the economics academic literature on Brexit. It is organised in: pillars, channels, and consequences. The two building blocks to understand Brexit are the economic history of the UK-EU relationship and the literature on the political economy of globalisation and populism. The...

This paper investigates whether joint economic and political integration leads to larger economic benefits than just economic integration. The identification strategy rests on the fact that Norway, at the time of the 1995 Enlargement of the European Union (EU), had successfully completed...

We investigate whether and how economic integration increases state capacity. This important relationship has not been studied in detail so far. We put together a conceptual framework to guide our analysis that highlights what we call the Montesquieu, Weber and Smith channels. Each of these...

This paper presents new estimates of the economic benefits from economic and political integration. Using the synthetic counterfactuals method, we estimate how GDP per capita and labour productivity would have behaved for the countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the 1973, 1980s, 1995...

The enlargement of the European Union has increased concerns about the role of generous welfare transfers in attracting migrants. This paper explores the issue of welfare migration across the 15 countries of the pre-enlargement Union and finds a significant but small effect of the generosity of...

One of the strongest stylized facts of the transition is also one of the most unexpected: after 1989 Central and Eastern European and Former Soviet Union countries diverged massively. Institutions are a main reason. The EU anchor thesis posits that the prospect of membership in the European...

We provide a first timely assessment of the pandemic crisis impact on the labour market prospects of immigrant workers in Europe by proposing a novel measure of their exposure to employment risk. We characterize migrants' occupations along four dimensions related to the role of workers'...

This paper studies the productivity effects of integration deepening. The identification strategy exploits the 1995 European Union (EU) enlargement, when all candidate countries joined the Single Market but one - Norway - did not join the EU. Our synthetic difference-in-differences estimates on...

This paper contributes to the literature on the Covid-19 effects on workers and labor markets by focusing on the experience of migrant key workers in EU countries. Our analysis, based on survey data on more than 3 million workers, explores three main aspects. First, we document the...