We take a first pass at quantifying the magnitudes of debt relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1979-2010, focusing on credit events in emerging markets, and 1920-1939, documenting the official debt hangover in advanced economies that was created by World...

Using a repeated cross-section of more than 258,000 residents of 39 European countries covering the period from 1990 to 2012, I study the impact of knowing different foreign languages on income and (for the first time) on unemployment. To help identify causal effects, I also employ a novel...

Two of the four macroeconomic adjustment programmes, Portugal and Ireland s, can be considered a success in the sense that the initial expectations in terms of adjustment, both fiscal and external, were broadly fulfilled. A rebound based on exports has taken hold in these two countries, but a...

Defining quality of life (qol) at personal or societal level is a difficult process which largely depends on the selected determining factors. Among the various parameters having been proposed as qol determinants, leisure and culture issues have only recently found their place, as they had long...

European Cohesion Policy has traditionally been considered as a useful tool to advance in the economic integration of the European Union by helping less developed regions in their convergence process with more developed ones. Nowadays European Cohesion Policy and Structural Funds are one of the...

The speed of income convergence in Europe remains one of the hot topics in regional economics. Recently Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) applied to spatial autoregressive models seems to have gained more popularity. BMA averages over some predetermined number of so called top models, ranked by the...

The aim of the study is to examine two issues of consumer air travel accessibility in Europe, namely flight time and ticket costs. The first part of the paper discusses the various methodological problems of creating time matrix and cost matrix of air travel. Because of problems of...

There is an ongoing debate on the concentration of container throughput in the European container port system. A particular feature is the dominant position of ports located in the Hamburg-Le Havre range. Some proponents of southern European ports argue that a shift in port traffic from the...

Innovation and entrepreneurship are key factors in current regional development initiatives, derived from the concepts of new economic growth theory. The aim of this paper is to combine an assessment of innovative and entrepreneurial performance with the spatial distribution and functional...

In this paper we focus on one type of externality, namely knowledge spillovers. Empirical studies on effects of knowledge spillovers in Europe have normally focused on localized effects, either on total factor productivity or knowledge production in terms of patent output. The purpose of this...