The European Union (EU) has long been accused of suffering from a “democratic deficit.” The European Parliament (EP), the only EU institution directly elected by citizens, is seen as having limited powers. Moreover, its members (MEPs) are often portrayed as unresponsive to the interests of...

We compute a GVAR to estimate the fiscal spillovers on output, consumption, investment, employment, and income, from 2002Q1 to 2021Q4, with 16 Euro Area (EA) countries. We found that a budget balance expansionary shock in Germany would generate positive spillovers on output and employment....

This paper analyses the persistence and mean reversion properties of sovereign debt and its components by applying fractional integration methods to long runs of annual data starting in 1831 for the UK and the US, in 1862 for Italy and in 1881 for France and Germany, and ending in all cases in...

In the past few decades, a myriad of reforms in Europe have had a significant impact on the way and extent to which public pensions provide retirement income. This departmental paper takes stock of where European pension systems stand and assesses their key characteristics. We present a novel...

Using a novel dataset that integrates inflation expectations with information on social network connections, we show that inflation expectations within one's social network have a positive, causal relationship with individual inflation expectations. This relationship is stronger for groups that...

"In recent years, market definition has come under attack as an analytical tool of competition law. Scholars have increasingly questioned its usefulness and feasibility. That criticism comes into sharper relief in dynamic, innovation-driven markets, which do not correspond to the static markets...