During the economic and financial crisis, the divide between young and old in the European Union increased in terms of economic well-being and allocation of resources by governments. As youth unemployment and youth poverty rates increased, government spending shifted away from education,...

This paper provides empirical evidence that countries in emerging Europe reaped the benefits of international financial integration over the past 12 years by attracting sizeable foreign capital inflows and accelerating medium-term growth. But the aggregate pattern masks substantial heterogeneity...

As a result of the Cold War and the isolation of East and West Europe from each other there have been sizeable income disparities between both regions with Eastern Europe ultimately lagging behind significantly. Since the fall of the Soviet Union Eastern European countries sought closer...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that a severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and remained...

The paper offers some reflections on the convergence of productivity in the United States and Europe, which essentially stopped in the 1990s. It argues that the barriers preventing further convergence in the early 1990s were removed subsequently. But since then trends in productivity growth have...