This paper demonstrates that insiders can erect barriers to entry and skim rents by sinking costs in human capital when labour markets are otherwise perfectly contestable. The sunk costs nature of human capital investments may result from the need to satisfy ever increasing specialised skill...

This book is a critical review of current fiscal and monetary policy in Europe and presents results of both empirical research and a discussion of the theoretical framework behind the policy of the European Central Bank and the Stability and Growth Pact. Macroeconomic policy is often hotly...

In this paper we document the growing dispersion of external and internal balances between countries in the North and South of the Euro area over the time period 1992 to 2007. We find a persistent divergence process that seems to have started with the introduction of the common currency and has...

Immigration can help to lessen the burden of ageing for the welfare states of most Western economies. To show this, we develop a decomposition framework for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita which deals with the impact of both ageing and immigration on economic growth. Using a Vector Error...