For decades, countries aspiring to join the European Union (EU) have been linked to it through migration. Yet little is known about how migration affects individual support for joining the EU in prospective member states. We explore the relationship between migration and support for EU accession...

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...

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...

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...

The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion in the number of...

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...

The common European labor market encourages worker mobility that enhances allocative efficiency, but certain institutional features may trigger inefficient migration. As a job in one of Europe's high-income countries typically also entails coverage in a generous welfare and social insurance...

The 2004 European Union enlargement resulted in an unprecedented wave of 1.5 million workers relocating from Eastern Europe to the UK. We study how this migrant inflow affected life satisfaction of native residents in England and Wales. Combining the British Household Panel Survey with the Local...

This paper summarises the key findings of a recent study on the impact of Eastern Enlargement of the European Union (EU) on labour markets in the current Member States. The study focuses on three main channels, along which enlargement may affect labour markets in the EU, namely i) trade, ii)...

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...