The accession of Bulgaria and Romania into the European Union (EU) in 2007 offers significant theoretical and empirical insights into the way in which the EU has deployed and realised its enlargement strategy/strategies over the past 15 years. Borrowing from the literature on enlargement-led...

Greek exceptionalism is a claim widely made in comparative politics. In this article I argue against the proposition that Greece differs from the EU norm regarding the disbursement of state aids to industry. Using data from the European Commission during the period 1992-2004, I subject the...

This paper considers the spatial distribution of economic activities in the European Union. It has three main aims. (i) To describe the data that is available in the EU and give some idea of the rich spatial data sets that are fast becoming available at the national level. (ii) To present...

This paper investigates the sources and size of trade barriers at the industry level. We derive a micro-founded measure of industry-specific bilateral trade integration that has an in-built control for time-varying multilateral resistance. This trade integration measure is consistent with a...

This paper sets out to analyse the regional policy of the European Union by assessing whether the actual distribution of funds to the regions undermines the principle of territorial concentration. The empirical analysis shows that, due to either political equilibriums or inaccurate assumptions...

International posting of workers and mobility of self-employed service suppliers lie between outright migration and trade in goods: their regulation, for both distributional and marketcorrecting purposes, is not as difficult to harmonize as that of labour markets, but personal mobility is more...

This article investigates the role of the EU in conflict resolution, taking Cyprus as a case of an 'internalised' conflict, whereby a side of the dispute has become a member state (Greek-Cypriots), while the rest of actors (Turkey, Turkish Cypriots) remain outside but are still developing...

We use a representative and cross-country comparable sample of manufacturing firms (EFIGE) to document patterns of interaction among firm-level internationalization, innovation and productivity across seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom). We...

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what...

As member states struggle to retain the investment grades necessary to allow them to finance their governmental operations at a reasonable cost, credit rating agencies (CRAs) have been blamed for exacerbating a procyclical bias which only makes this task more difficult. How CRAs contribute to...