The focus of this dissertation is on vulnerability to poverty and on wage discrimination of Roma in South East Europe with the aim to reveal the systemic causes of poverty and labour market disadvantage. It calls attention to the interaction of various socio-economic factors that are responsible...

We model EU countries? bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. We find that country-specific factors (in the form of heterogeneous intercepts) are a crucial determinant of ratings. Whilst ?new? EU countries typically have lower ratings than...