Social security revenues are influenced by business cycle movements. In order to support the working of automatic stabilizers it would be necessary to calculate social insurance contribution rates independently from the state of the business cycle. This paper investigates whether European...

Social security revenues are influenced by business cycle movements. In order to support the working of automatic stabilizers it would be necessary to calculate social insurance contribution rates independently from the state of the business cycle. This paper investigates whether European...

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

Structural Funds are the main instrument of the EU cohesion policy. Their effective use is subject to an ongoing debate in political and scientific circles. European fiscal assistance under this heading should promote economic and social cohesion in the member states of the European Union....

In the European Monetary Union the transnational coordination of collective wage bargaining has acquired increased importance on the trade union agenda. The metal sector has been at the forefront of these developments. This paper addresses the issue of crossborder coordination of wage setting in...

Fiscal spending multiplier calculations have been revived in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Much of the current literature is based on VAR estimation methods and DSGE models. The aim of this paper is not a further deepening of this literature but rather to implement a calculation...

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

An active role of fiscal policy has been rediscovered as a crisis remedy at the beginning of the financial crisis all over Europe. More recently, the Euro Crisis with its mounting governments' funding costs for a number of Southern EU member states and Ireland has called this strategy into...