In this paper, we discuss whether and how bank lobbying can lead to regulatory capture and have real consequences through an overview of the motivations behind bank lobbying and of recent empirical evidence on the subject. Overall, the findings are consistent with regulatory capture, which...

Labor market deregulation, intended to boost productivity and employment, is one plausible, yet little studied, driver of the decline in labor shares that took place across most advanced economies since the early 1990s. This paper assesses the impact of job protection deregulation in a sample of...

The EU Services Directive was adopted in 2006 to foster competition in services across Europe. However, progress in liberalizing services has fallen short of expectations due to the article 15 of the Directive, which allows countries to maintain pre-existing restrictions if judged necessary to...

Are preferences for reforms driven by individuals' own endowments or beliefs? To address this question, we conducted a cross-country survey on people's opinions on employment protection legislation-an area where reform has proven to be difficult and personal interests are at stake. We find that...

This paper assesses whether and how financial development triggers the occurrence of banking crises. It builds on a database that includes financial development as well as financial access, depth and efficiency for almost 100 countries. Through estimation of a dynamic logit panel model, it...

We build a two-country currency union DSGE model with endogenous growth to assess the role of cross-country differences in product and labor market regulations for long-term growth and for the adjustment to shocks. We show that with endogenous growth, there is no reason to expect real income...