The financial crisis has brought to the fore concerns regarding small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) capacity to access traditional bank lending. Using European firm-level data on SME access to finance since the onset of the financial crisis, we find that bank-lending constrained SMEs are...

This paper investigates the simulation of common policy reforms across different countries. Changes to the equivalence scales of social assistance systems in favour of pensions and children in Germany, Ireland and the UK were modelled. Unlike a number of previous studies of this kind such as...

Past studies of regional economic disparities in the EU are entirely based on the information provided by macroeconomic variables. This paper considers the microeconomic perspectives of a region, paying attention not only to average but also to inequality levels of individual incomes within...

This paper provides an empirical study of the determinants of income inequality across regions of the EU. Using the European Community Household Panel data set for 102 regions over the period 1995-2000, it analyses how microeconomic changes in human capital distribution affect income inequality...

The aim of this paper is to visualise and describe the educational attainment and inequality distributions and to detect patterns of global and local spatial autocorrelation, using the European Community Household Panel dataset for 102 regions over the period 1995-2000. It investigates the...