The study investigates the business cycle dynamics in the euro area using an empirical framework which comprises common global and euro area shocks as well as allows bilateral spillovers of country-specific shocks across the member economies. Three core questions lie at the heart of the...

"Race-to-the-bottom" deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern is...

The European Union's (EU) mission has been and continues to be the establishment of a single, internal market for financial services comprising the entire territory of its fifteen Member States. Achieving a single market was historically dependent on provision of market access and development of...

The European Community (EC), as part of its mandate under the Treaty of Rome to create a single internal market by 1992, has enacted an EC-wide prohibition on insider trading. The EC's “Council Directive Coordinating Regulations on Insider Dealing” is a mandatory model act setting forth the...

This paper distinguishes four alternative sovereign debt resolution mechanisms: pure market solutions, modified market solutions, crisis lending by the IMF and other institutions, and the proposed Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM). It is hard to find - at the general level of...

Eastern Europe is one of the fastest growing transition economies of the world. The post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, especially the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, continue to undergo a radical economic reform program via microeconomic liberalization, macroeconomic...

This paper builds on the recent debate on the in-sample and out-of-sample predictability of US aggregate returns using a wide range of predictors by providing new evidence for smaller and less market-oriented European countries. We find evidence that macro and technical predictors can...

The European Union was created to promote economic, cultural, and regional prosperity. However, the Global Financial Crisis demonstrates that its economic institutions are flawed. While each sovereign state in the Eurozone forfeits the control of its money supply, the lack of a common fiscal...

The geographic structure of the Magharib countries necessitates its political and economic partnership. However, there were many hindrances that curtailed further mutual benefits in the past decades. That minimized its economic cooperation in many ways. The emergence of the WTO adds to questions...