Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

This work attempts to examine how the global financial crisis has affected the education sector and more specifically, universities. So our paper examines the universities public funding especially in Europe, the mobility of teaching staff, students etc. Also the impact of the financial crisis...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

Income equality and trust seem to go along with several other ingredients of social capital as determinants of economic growth across the globe. In a large sample of countries, equality in the distribution of income as measured by the World Bank and by The Standardized World Income Inequality...

On 23rd February 2017, SUERF and EY organized a conference on "Brexit and the Implications for Financial Services" at EY's offices, Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London. While the outcome of the Brexit negotiations remains highly uncertain, the conference discussed the burning questions for...

In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives of banks, depositors, and regulators around bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, leading to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A rules-based prompt...

This paper endogenizes the spatial distribution of infrastructure investment and transportation costs. Transportation costs between two addresses depend on cumulative infrastructure investment. In a continuous space setting with several independent countries or regions, consumers demand domestic...