This paper discusses the balance between market pressure and fiscal rules in order to keep public finances on a sustainable path. We provide empirical evidence on market assessments of sovereign default risk to economic news, announcements of national austerity programs, EU programs designed to...

A ‘sudden stop’ to (private) capital inflows is usually very disruptive to an economy because it forces an almost immediate reversal in the current account unless the country in question receives substantial balance of payments assistance. The analysis presented in this paper starts from the...

This paper starts by reviewing medium- to long-term growth prospects provided in recent academic and policy research. The paper argues that, owing to the on-going advances in ICT, much higher growth is technologically feasible, but that a considerable amount of churn and reallocation across...

This paper establishes theoretically a link between investments in economic growth and investments in R and D. This raises the importance of innovation policies as they are designed to narrow the gap between the socially optimal and the privately optimal levels of R and D. As innovation policies...

This paper consists of two parts. Part I (“The economics of achieving social inclusion in changing labour and capital markets”) provides an economic analysis of the challenge of meeting the Europe 2020 objectives with regard to employment and social inclusion. Part II (“Putting people...

This paper revisits the issue of Europe’s growth slowdown in the light of the developments of the first decade of the 21st century, including the devastating effects from the 2008/09 recession and the subsequent economic and financial crisis on Europe’s growth performance. From a supply side...

According to conventional indicators, the euro-area financial integration has receded since 2007, mainly in the money market, sovereign debt market and uncollateralized credit markets. But price-based measures of debt market segmentation are inappropriate when solvency risk differs across...

Because of recent economic crises, financial fragility has regained prominence in both the theory and practice of macroeconomic policy. Consistent with macroeconomic paradigms prevalent at the time, the original architecture of the euro zone assumed that safeguards against inflation and...

We investigate the behaviour of gross capital flows and net capital flows for euro area member countries. We highlight the extraordinary boom-bust cycles in both gross flows and net flows since 2003. We also show that the reversal in net capital flows during the crisis has been very costly in...

This paper analyses the interactions between household wealth, mortgage decisions and savings in a single empirical framework and identifies an important role for a "down-payment channel" in the euro area. Contrary to the traditional housing wealth channel, the "down-payment channel" posits a...