The need to balance austerity with growth policies has put government efficiency high on the economic policy agenda in Europe. Administrative reforms which boost the efficiency of the administration can alleviate the trade-off between consolidation and public service provision. Against such...

This paper uses sovereign CDS spread changes and their volatilities as a proxy for the informational efficiency of the sovereign markets and persistency of country risks. Specifically, we apply semi-parametric and parametric methods to the sovereign CDSs of 10 eurozone countries to test the...

We distinguish exogenous liquidity, which corresponds to the variability of bid-ask spreads for usual-sized transactions, from endogenous liquidity, which we interpret as the impact of liquidity on market prices when liquidating larger positions. Endogenous liquidity measures the risk that the...

This paper focuses on two aspects being neglected in the analysis of agglomeration tendencies so far. First, it regards regional agglomeration patterns and secondly, the allocation of capital across industrial sectors. Indeed, the average relative concentration of capital turns out to be of a...

This paper analyses the level of relative specialisation in terms of gross fixed capital formation in EU regions for the period between 1985 and 1994. Controlling for heteroscedasticity and potential endogeneity problems, we get consistent econometric results. Larger market and regional sizes...

Who benefits from the evasion of value added taxes (VAT)? Using a reform that enforced VAT on previously non-compliant large retailers in Armenia, we estimate a onethird passthrough of the tax burden on prices. This suggests that pre-enforcement evasion rents were broadly shared with consumers...