Scholarship on the relationships between key macroeconomic variables and defense investment is divided on both the appropriate level of aggregation for such analysis, and the direction of causality between macroeconomic variables and defense investment. Both NATO and the EU, through the European...

We empirically assess the impact of competitiveness measured by unit labor costs for current account balances in the Euro area. For this purpose, we estimate a panel with annual observations from 2000 to 2013. Our findings confirm the importance of competitiveness: Higher unit labor costs growth...

Both theorists and practitioners continue to show interest in transatlantic burden-sharing. International security and political economy scholarship offers plausible explanations for transatlantic imbalances in military expenditures. However, NATO Allies and EU Member States have pledged to one...

This paper analyses the possible presence of Granger causality between military spending and unemployment rates in the EU15 countries. The panel bootstrap test applied allows us to control for both the presence of cross-country heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. Considering two...

The aim of this paper is to study the interdependence of military spending between US and a panel of European countries in the period 1988-2013. The empirical estimation is based on a: (i) a unit root tests and a cointegration analysis; (ii) FMOLS and DOLS estimations. General results highlight...

The European Commission (EC) has proposed expanding the European Defence Fund, an initiative to fund defense technology developed in Europe. As a general matter, only European firms would have access to the fund for development, and participating European nations would need to commit themselves...

This exercise is an attempt to assess the importance of some social, economic, demographic and infrastructural factors which account for the prevailing income inequality across some of the EU countries. Using discriminant analysis the study suggests that crime recorded by police is the most...

We provide an early assessment of the Juncker Commission's contributions to the ongoing reform of the euro area. In doing so, we present a chronological summary of the reform process up to 2014. At the time, the euro area architecture had undergone many changes. These were mainly focused on risk...

The paper demonstrates that policy makers may have a precautionary motive to undertake more labor-market reform--and hence attain lower equilibrium unemployment--inside a monetary union than outside. The reason is a desire to reduce the utility cost of variations in employment when asymmetric...

The paper analyzes various mechanisms through which monetary union in Europe may affect unemployment. The focus is on the political incentives for labor-market reform. There will be more reform outside than inside the EMU to the extent that a national inflation bias can be reduced. But if there...