The present study looks at a range of questions related to the social and economic consequences of private equity/LBO activity raised by the European Parliament. Overall, we find private equity to be a well-functioning, established industry that fulfils a crucial role in our economy by providing...

E.ON is one of the largest investor-owned energy providers in the world. The company delivers energy to millions of customers and, together with EDF, is the biggest energy supplier in Europe. Employing more than 80,000 people, E.ON also has the duty to establish favourable working conditions for...

The preliminary results of the second Quality of Work in Italy Survey, carried out in 2006 by the National Training Agency, show that working conditions have tended to decline since the 2002 survey, although overall job satisfaction is still high. Italian workers seem to be less satisfied with...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, for West Germany, France, Italy and US, we econometrically select within a SVAR model some fiscal policy regimes, i.e. a u0094set of rulesu0094 for the implementation of fiscal policies. Second, we identify the fiscal policy shocks related to different...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the US, Japan and the euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, in this paper we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...