The question of the spatial impacts of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has animated the intellectual and policy debate for a long time. At the beginning of the 1990s the rise of the Internet brought a new surge of debate: it was argued that the Internet would free the economy...

In this empirical paper, I use the 1996 wave of the ECHP dataset to investigate the relationship between measures of wage compression and training incidence in 11 European countries. I find that, after controlling for individual factors and country specific institutional differences, there is...

I propose a discrete choice method for estimating monetary policy reaction functions based on research by Hu and Phillips (2004). This method distinguishes between determining the underlying desired rate which drives policy rate changes and actually implementing interest rate changes. The method...

Survey results in 15 European countries for almost 15,000 firms reveal that Belgian firms react more than the average European firm to adverse shocks by reducing permanent and temporary employment. On the basis of a firm-level analysis, this paper confirms that the different reaction to shocks...

This paper decomposes the explained part of the CDS spread changes of 31 listed euro area banks according to various risk drivers. The choice of the credit risk drivers is inspired by the Merton (1974) model. Individual CDS liquidity and other market and business variables are identified to...

This paper documents the existence of inter-industry wage differentials across a large number of industries for eight EU countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain) at two different points in time (in general, 1995 and 2002). It then looks into...

The European Commission (2001a) has recently presented a directive proposal to the Parliament and the Council in order to implement a tradable permits scheme. However, as stressed by the positive political economy, due to the influence of various interest groups, very few environmental policies...

In this paper we examine the content of farm animal biodiversity conservation measurescurrently under implementation in the European Union (EU), as a result of the application of EC Regulations 1257/99 and 1750/99. We surveyed 69 Rural Development Plans (RDPs) set up in EU Member States. Our...

In this paper I outline - from a practitioner's as well as from a researcher's perspective - several of the key developments that took place during the last century in monetary policy. In particular, I describe how the monetary system evolved from gold standard, prevailing throughout most of the...

Firms have multiple options at the time of adjusting their wage bills. However, previous literature has mainly focused on base wages. We broaden the analysis beyond downward rigidity in base wages by investigating the use of other margins of labour cost adjustment at the firm level. Using data...