This paper compares the bank regulatory regimes in the enlarged European Union in order to test the thesis claiming that international banking standards need to be adapted to emerging market circumstances. On the basis of World Bank surveys, we compile structural indices for the 10...

The main goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of key regulatory changes in the European merger control and to evaluate their real impact on the efficiency of merger regulation. Our main contribution is an empirical analysis of a unique representative sample of 161 horizontal mergers...

Ten Central European countries became members of the European Union in the years 2004 - 2007. They constitute 20% of the EU’s total population; and even though their economic output is much lower, it rises dynamically. New members’ impact on the EU policies has nevertheless been limited....

This paper focuses on the role of labour market institutions in explaining different labour market developments in European countries, with a special attention to the new European Union member countries. Labour market in these two parts of the EU witnessed diverging developments in the late...

This paper analyzes pension reforms in Europe and their determinants. As pension reforms are intrinsically difficult to define and pinpoint, we introduce an alternative measure of pension reforms by comparing long-term forecasts of pension expenditures for seventeen European countries. The...

This paper analyses the European budget and the position of the ten new member states. We argue that the EU budget should be reconsidered, as the Union has expanded to 27 member states and has become more heterogeneous. The budget priorities must be re-oriented towards potentially productive...

In this paper, we set out to examine an efficient fiscal policy framework for a monetary union. We find that a monetary union can survive with diverging fiscal policies and that the financial markets are efficient enough to separate between “good” and “bad” fiscal policies and punish the...

This paper examines theoretically and empirically the extent to which the decision by foreign firms to invest in a group of countries is influenced by economic factors, as opposed to political risk and institutional performance. We consider the importance of these factors as drivers of foreign...

This paper analyzes the role of labor market institutions in explaining developments of shadow economies in European countries. We use several alternative measures of the shadow sector, and we examine effects of labor institutions on shadow sector in two specific regions: new and old European...

This paper concentrates on the golden rule of public finance. It reviews the main advantages and disadvantages of the potential implementation of this rule in the European Union. Often the question of the productivity of public capital is at the heart of the rule’s discussions. As this issue...