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...

EU climate and energy policy defines ambitious objectives for the EU member countries requiring a fundamental change of energy systems. This paper suggests basing the analysis of restructuring options on energy services instead of energy flows. In order to provide the energy services in a...

The determinants of venture capital investment have attracted a significant amount of attention from both academics and policymakers. We use a version of the Keuschnigg-Nielsen model for venture-capital financed projects to condition our analysis on a reasonable set of exogenous variables but we...

This paper sets out a comprehensive framework to identify regional business cycles within Spain and analyses their stylised features and the degree of synchronisation among them and the Spanish economy. We show that the regional cycles are quite heterogeneous although they display some degree of...

Social scientists have long argued that developed countries are more and more responsible for climate change because they externalise pollution to less developed countries. This paper offers a way to quantify climate responsibility by calculating carbon footprints and carbon balances between...

The empirical literature on mergers, market power and collusion in differentiated markets has mainly focused on methods relying on output and/or panel data. In contrast to this literature we suggest a novel approach that allows for the detection of collusive behaviour among a group of firms...

Mit dem seit 2013 gültigen Fiskalpakt und seiner Umsetzung hat die Politik in der EU wesentliche Forderungen der ideologischen Hauptgegner des Europäischen Sozialmodells, der "Schule von Chicago", übernommen. Erstens wird mit dem Pakt die Fiskalpolitik noch enger an Regeln gebunden,...

It is frequently claimed that high levels of generalised trust are conducive for economic reforms. In contrast, the "traditional view" on institutional and political constraints on the executive (IPCE) postulates that high IPCE tend to paralyse the decision-making process, thus blocking required...

Recent research has shown that the degree to which people feel they are in control of their lives is an important correlate of individual happiness, where those that feel more in control are also found to be systematically happier. In turn, the economic sources of perceived life control are only...

This paper provides a survey of the effects of market competition in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The pivotal element of the transition was inter-firm competition, which replaced economic planning as the method to identify demand. Pro-competitive policies that...