Despite the EU emphasis on the 1995 Barcelona process, trade integration with the Mediterranean (MED) countries is still underdeveloped. To contrast the success of EU integration with MED countries and that with the new EU members, we compute the trade potential of these EU partners from 1995 to...

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...

In this paper, we use 1991-2005 panel data on the unemployed, vacancies, inflow into unemployment, and outflow from unemployment in five former communist economies and in the western part of Germany (a benchmark western economy) to examine the evolution of unemployment together with that of...

The paper examines the relationship between leverage and growth in a group of emerging central and eastern European countries, who are at different levels of financial market development. We hypothesize a non-linear relationship in that moderate leverage could boost growth while very high...

Assessing the migration potential and predicting future migration streams are among the most relevant, yet least well understood topics of migration research. The usual approach taken to address aggregate-level prediction problems is to fit ad hoc specifications to historical data, and to...

The UK was one of only three countries that granted free movement of workers to accession nationals following the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004. The resulting large, rapid and concentrated migration inflow can be seen as a natural experiment that arguably corresponds closely to...

Very little is known about gender wage disparities in Kosovo and, to date, nothing is known about how such wage disparities evolve over time, particularly during the first few years spent by young workers in the labor market. More generally, not much is known about gender wage gaps in early...

The Roma are both the largest 'minority' ethnic group in Central and South Eastern Europe and the one which suffered most from transition to the market. Still today, nearly forty years after the introduction of the EU's 1975 Discrimination Directive and with the end of the 'Roma Decade'...

We examine the effects of emigration and remittances on the corruption experience of migrant household members staying in the countries of origin. We hypothesize that the effects of emigration on corruption can be both positive (via migrant value transfer) and negative (via misuse of monetary...

Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the Habsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens' trust in local public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the...