Im Juni 2015 wird die Initiative der Europäischen Kommission zur Finanzierung von Infrastrukturinvestitionen, der sogenannte Juncker-Plan, in Kraft treten. Dazu wird ein Europäischer Fonds gegründet, dessen finanzielle Ausstattung vor allem vom Kapitalmarkt kommen soll und von der EU...

It is by now a widely shared insight that fiscal policy needs to be re-strengthened as a macroeconomic policy instrument within European macroeconomic policies: Recent experiences with austerity policies, new research regarding the size of the fiscal multiplier and the fact that monetary policy...

Scholarship on the relationships between key macroeconomic variables and defense investment is divided on both the appropriate level of aggregation for such analysis, and the direction of causality between macroeconomic variables and defense investment. Both NATO and the EU, through the European...

In our increasingly globalized economy, global competitiveness of countries and means to measure it gain increasing significance. One of the ways to measure it is by comparing an extent of economic freedom that countries have, which as surveys show can also largely explain differences in living...

This study provides an overview of UK infrastructure investment and finance in an international context, yielding interesting facts insights for both investors and policy makers worldwide. The UK is one of the leading countries in terms of private sector involvement in infrastructure, with...

We take stock of what is known about public investment in the member states of the European Union, old and new alike. The interesting features about the long-term evolution of public investment have been its downtrend in old EU member states, bar the cohesion countries, and its volatility in new...

This paper investigates whether there is a lack of public capital in European Union countries. The analysis builds on a new database providing internationally comparable capital stock estimates for 22 OECD countries, among these 14 EU countries, for the period 1960-2001. A simple model of...

I use micro data to quantify key features of U.S. firm financing. In particular, I establish that a substantial 35% of firms' investment is funded using financial markets. I then construct a dynamic equilibrium model that matches these features and fit the model to business cycle data using...