In this paper we study how promoting product market competition by reducing mark-ups or by increasing productivity are able to complement labor market reforms. We use a simple general equilibrium model with different types of labor. The bottom-line of the paper is that product market reforms...

This paper analyzes the effects of mergers on markups of non-merging rival firms in narrowly defined markets. Combining data from the European Commission’s market assessments in merger decisions with production data, we use recent methodological advances in the estimation of production...

This paper addresses the question of the British state of convergence towards the Euro area, compared to the USA. Economically, the analysis is based on dependences in the money and capital markets, namely the uncovered interest parity (UIP) and the expectation hypothesis of the term structure...

European sovereign debt markets have been under scrutiny ever since the sovereign debt crisis of 2009. In this paper, we decompose bond and CDS spreads into fundamental and non-fundamental parts by means of a heterogeneous agent model. The model contains arbitrageurs who make use of the...

We study the synchronization of credit booms and busts among 12 major European economies and the United States between 1972-2011. We propose a regression-based procedure to test whether boom-bust phases of credit cycles coincide across countries and to cluster countries with positively...

Building on the growing evidence on the importance of large data sets for empirical macroe-conomic modeling, we estimate a large-scale FAVAR model for 18 OECD member countries. We quantify the global effects of economic policy uncertainty shocks and check whether the signs, the magnitude, and...

Building on the growing evidence on the importance of large data sets for empirical macroeconomic modeling, we estimate a large-scale FAVAR model for 18 OECD member countries. We quantify the global effects of economic policy uncertainty shocks and check whether the signs, the magnitude, and the...

In times of increasing oil prices and a weak dollar, European companies that focus their business on the US market may find themselves in a weak position. While many businesses can hedge this kind of risk by relocating production to the US, or employing financial remedies, these strategies may...