EMU is, to a large extent, the result of a process of Franco-German reconciliation and understanding. However, in the postwar period, there were significant differences in ideas and economic policy-making in Germany and France. France was dominated by the "tradition républicaine", giving a...

Anglo-American stock markets are much larger than their continental counterparts. Does investor protection and governance explain these differences? Using UK data, we examine four different forms of intervention which are suppose to promote good governance: takeovers, independent directors,...

This study provides a detailed and easy-to read overview of the railway liberalisation in Belgium and the three neighbouring countries. The European Union's liberalisation Directives are often complex and are implemented in very specific ways in the different Member States. The analysis goes...

This paper uses detailed micro data on service exports at the firm-destination-service level to analyse the role of firm heterogeneity in shaping aggregate service exports in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain from 2003 to 2007. We decompose the level and the growth of aggregate service exports...

This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

The purpose of this paper is to measure the potential impact of business-sector concentration on economic capital for loan portfolios and to explore a tractable model for its measurement. The empirical part evaluates the increase in economic capital in a multi-factor asset value model for...

We investigate the contribution of the increase in German (DE) income inequality to the German export surplus increase and the decline of the natural rate of interest in the Euro Area in an open economy model with rich and non-rich households. Rich households have Capitalist Spirit type...