This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

Can patent protection and product market competition complement each other in enhancing incentives to innovate? In this paper, we address this question by investigating how innovation responses to a substantial policy initiative increasing product market competition interact with the strength of...

The question of what is a sustainable public debt is paramount in the macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy. This question is usually posed as asking whether the outstanding public debt and its projected path are consistent with those of the government's revenues and expenditures (i.e. whether...

This study grounds the establishment of EMU and the euro in the context of the history of international monetary cooperation and of monetary unions, above all in the U.S., Germany and Italy. The purpose of national monetary unions was to reduce transactions costs of multiple currencies and...

The internal market in Europe will greatly increase the international mobility of resources. How will this affect fiscal policy in different countries? The first part of the paper considers taxation of capital in a two country model, where a democratically chosen government in each country...

Monetary policies in the U.S., Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom over the period 1973-1986 are compared and evaluated, with the aim of drawing lessons for monetary policy from the recent historical record. All four countries shifted during this period to money targeting, though with...

In this paper we document the impact of immigration at the regional level on Europeans' political preferences as expressed by voting behavior in parliamentary or presidential elections between 2007 and 2016. We combine individual data on party voting with a classification of each party's...

By merging KLEMS data sets and aggregating over the ten largest Western European nations (EU-10), we are able to compare and contrast productivity growth up through 2015 starting from 1950 in the U.S. and from 1972 in the EU-10. Data are provided at the aggregate level, as well as for 16...

We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...

Most observers have concluded that while money markets and government bond markets are rapidly integrating following the introduction of the common currency in the euro area, there is little evidence that a similar integration process is taking place for retail banking. Data on cross-border...