Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose an ex-post accounting framework...

This paper examines the house price dynamics for thirteen European countries. A Markov-switching error correction model is estimated on house price returns at the country level, with deviations between house prices and fundamentals feeding into the short-run dynamics. The system is assumed to be...

The paper develops an early-warning model for predicting vulnerabilities leading to distress in European banks using both bank and country-level data. As outright bank failures have been rare in Europe, the paper introduces a novel dataset that complements bankruptcies and defaults with state...

This paper assesses the Euro's influence upon European trade by estimating two different indicators. The first is the so-called “Rose Effect”, while the second is the “Border Effect”. The former measures how much a country within a currency union trades more with its partners than with...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the relation between the Border Effect and industrial concentration. This is achieved by founding this relation on the Home Market Effect and testing the robustness of this foundation through an application to the European Single Market. A sectorial...

The European Single Market created a common market for millions of Europeans. However, thirty years after its introduction, it appears that the benefits of the common European project are occasionally being questioned at least by some parts of the population. Others, by contrast, strive for...

Lobbying can provide policy makers with important sector-specific information and thereby facilitating informed decisions. If going far beyond this, in particular if successfully influencing policy makers to unnecessarily tighten regulation or not opening already excessively regulated markets,...

This paper illustrates the main features of the Labour Module of the CompNet dataset which provides indicators of firm growth over the period 1995-2012 across 17 EU (13 euro area) countries and 9 macro-sectors. It also includes information on a large set of micro-aggregated characteristics of...

In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for conducting forward-looking assessments of profitability and solvency of the main euro area insurance sectors. We model the balance sheet of an insurance company encompassing both life and non-life business and we calibrate it using country...

This paper explores the connection between "zombie" firms (firms that would typically exit in a competitive market) and bank health and the consequences for aggregate productivity in 11 European countries. Controlling for cyclical effects, the results show that zombie firms are more likely to be...