The establishment of the EU-15 `single market' in 1993 brought about a high degree of similarity in firms' growth opportunities across countries, while substantial diversity existed in the development of national financial markets. We compare within-industry growth rates of similar...

The establishment of the EU-15 'single market' in 1993 brought about a high degree of synchronization of industry shocks, while substantial diversity existed in the development of country-level financial markets. We compare within-industry growth rates of similar 'single-market' firms facing...

We exploit the substantial diversity in financial development of the 'single-market' EU- 15 economies to test whether more developed financial systems are better at tackling asymmetric information proxied by firm age and size. Comparing the growth effect of financial development across firms of...

Differences in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large and persistent. We show that inherited variation in human-capital endowment across the regions of four such economies explains the bulk of regional unemployment variation there and we explore potential explanations for...