As unemployment rises across the European Union (EU) it is important to understand the extent to which the incomes of the new unemployed are protected by tax-benefit systems and to assess the cost pressures on the governments. This paper uses the EU tax-benefit model EUROMOD to explore these...

We compare the distributional effects of policy changes introduced in the period 2008-2013 in twelve EU countries using the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD. The countries, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and the UK, chose different...

Lax financial conditions can foster credit booms. The global credit boom of the last decade led to large capital flows across the world, including large movements of resources from the Northern countries of the euro area towards the Southern part. Since the start of the crisis and more markedly...

Labour markets have reacted very differently to the COVID-19 crisis. In the US, the impact on unemployment rates was rapid across all states. They increased sharply in March and April 2020 and recovered steadily thereafter. In Europe, by contrast, unemployment increased far less, and the...

The recent financial crisis was caused by a combination of asset price bubbles, mainly in the real estate sector, and a credit bubble that led to excessive leverage. A recurrent theme of this paper is that an appropriate assessment of the crisis should be made in light of the bubble that...