It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. We...

We develop and discuss the three pathways to European Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading: a top-down scheme based on the Kyoto Protocol of the UNFCCC, a bottom-up scheme linking national trading systems of EU Member States, and an EU-wide regional scheme based on the founding principles of the...

We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential...

Consider a voting procedure where countries, states, or districts comprising a union each elect representatives who then participate in later votes at the union level on their behalf. The countries, provinces, and states may vary in their populations and composition. If we wish to maximize the...

After the collapse in the early years of transition, saving rates in many EU-accession countries have recovered and remained stable during recent years. This may indicate that the transformation process has come to an end with regard to savings. Is saving behaviour in EU-accession countries now...

This paper proposes a method for detecting income classes based on the change-point problem. There is an increasing demand for such a method in the literature. Computation of polarization indices requires a pre-grouping of the incomes. Similarly, indices of social exclusion and sometimes indices...

The purpose of this paper is to obtain by combining two longitudinal perspectives a more detailed national picture of poverty in the Member States of the European Union, using the first four waves (1994 - 1997) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). In addition to this detailed...

After the collapse in early transition years, saving rates in Eastern European EU-accession countries have recovered strongly. Is private saving in these countries now driven by the same forces as in the EU? A GMM estimator is applied to analyze the determinants of private saving in both country...

Using panel data on European regions and applying Analysis of Covariance, our study provides an empirical assessment of the relative importance of national, regional and spatial factors for explaining variations of productivity. Our analysis shows that initial economic conditions or...

Within the economic profession, it is a widely held view that the fiscal criteria of the Maastricht treaty are arbitrary numbers without economic foundation. Much of this criticism seems to overlook an important aspect - the strategic dimension of the criteria. This paper focuses on one...