A mechanism to restructure the debt of an insolvent euro country is a missing element in the emerging institutional architecture of the euro area. The introduction of an insolvency procedure for sovereigns faces a dilemma: In the foreseeable future, its introduction would risk pushing Europe...

The German experience of the crisis was very different compared to those of most other countries in Europe. Germany was hit by a very strong shock which was relatively concentrated in the exporting, manufacturing industries. In addition, the German labour market was very resilient during the...

This contribution develops a blueprint for a European fiscal union. The proposal addresses the shortcomings of most other reform designs which do not offer a solution for insolvent or noncooperative euro countries. We suggest a design which combines fiscal insurance with an orderly procedure to...

ICT-intensive firms are often found to have a better performance than their non-ICTintensive counterparts. Along with investing in ICT capital they have to adapt their production and business processes in order to reap the potentials implied by the use of ICT. Are these firms also more resilient...

The paper investigates the reaction of public R&D spending on economic crises. We are interested in two counteracting motives: On the one hand, public R&D spending can be seen as a means to fight the crisis, and governments may decide to increase their R&D budgets. On the other hand, a crisis...

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (Smets and Wouters, 2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary...

Although the future socio-economic benefits of a new fibre-based (“next generation access”, NGA) telecommunications infrastructure seem to be uncontroversial, a universal NGA coverage appears to be a rather unrealistic objective without government intervention. We contend, however, that the...

Due to behavioral effects triggered by redistributional interventions, it is still an open question whether government policies are able to effectively reduce income inequality. We contribute to this research question by using different country-level data sources to study inequality trends in...

This paper discusses the issue of profit shifting and “aggressive” tax planning by multinational firms. The paper makes two contributions. First, it provides some background information to the debate by giving a brief overview of existing empirical studies on profit shifting and by...

Aggressive tax planning efforts of highly profitable multinational companies (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS)) have recently become the subject of intense public debate. As a response, several international initiatives and parties have called for more transparency in financial reporting,...