This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

The Austrian Federal Government has set itself the goal to reduce the Maastricht deficit to 2.7 percent of the GDP by 2013. In the medium term, a consolidation of the public budgets will be necessary to regain room for manoeuvre for budget policy and to avoid undesirable distributive effects of...

Apparently the consolidation programmes that individual EU countries have presented so far broadly tend to take "the easy road". The latter includes short-term cuts in public sector pay, which are easy to push through, but do not lead to a lasting improvement of public finances, as well as an...

There is evidence that a budget consolidation strategy can work with only a small and short lived negative impact on growth. However, this time consolidation is taking place in the aftermath of a deep crisis which had lead to increased levels of uncertainty. In addition the financial sector, as...

This paper investigates the performance of labour markets during the recent crisis for 28 industrialised countries, specifically the reaction of employment and unemployment indicators relative to output changes. We construct a composite indicator for output as well as labour market performance....

The growth performance of countries proved to be very different during the recent crisis. We apply principal component analysis to derive a single ordinal indicator on growth performance and to analyse whether initial conditions of economies or structural characteristics can explain the...

This book provides an insightful view of major issues in the economics of corporate governance (CG) and mergers. It presents a systematic update on the developments in the two fields during the last decade, as well as highlighting the neglected topics in CG research, such as the role of boards,...