The services sector is increasingly important for the euro area economy, but productivity growth in the sector has stalled over the past two decades. Remaining barriers to cross-border trade in services within the EU Single Market contribute to this weak performance. Our empirical analysis...

This paper studies the role of wage moderation and labour and product market regulation for employment creation. To this end, labour demand estimates are presented for the five largest euro area countries at the aggregate level and for three macro sectors: manufacturing, construction and...

We develop a framework for analyzing "medium-runʺ departures from balanced growth, and apply it to the economies of continental Europe. A time-varying factor-augmenting production function (mimicking "directedʺ technical change) with a below-unitary substitution elasticity coupled with...