This paper investigates whether joint economic and political integration leads to larger economic benefits than just economic integration. The identification strategy rests on the fact that Norway, at the time of the 1995 Enlargement of the European Union (EU), had successfully completed...

More than half of the EU countries have become poorer and more unequal since the start of the crisis in 2008. Despite lack of timely household micro data, using microsimulation techniques with up-to-date information on policy rules enables us to estimate the direct effect of tax-benefit policy...

We compare the distributional effects of policy changes introduced in the period 2008-2013 in twelve EU countries using the EU microsimulation model EUROMOD. The countries, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and the UK, chose different...

Very low work intensity and at-risk-of-poverty are two of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Their timeliness is critical for tracing the effectiveness of policy interventions towards reaching this target....

The financial and economic crisis which started in the late 2000s and the fiscal consolidation measures to counter the subsequent government budget deficits have an impact on household income distribution and macroeconomic recovery. We consider the austerity measures in relation to their...

The at-risk-of-poverty rate is one of the three indicators used for monitoring progress towards the Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion reduction target. Timeliness of this indicator is critical for monitoring the effectiveness of policies. However, due in part to the complicated nature of...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU) vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their redistributive effects using EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. As well as describing redistributive effects in...

Europe's power system is still marked by a distinct national component, and despite some regions with strongly integrated power systems, electricity supply today still has a largely national basis. Policies to decarbonise the power sector may fundamentally alter this situation, because power...

The duration of merger proceedings held by competition authorities is an important determinant of the efficiency of the entire merger control process. We use a dataset of 2953 Phase I and 92 Phase II investigations completed by the European Commission (EC) between 1999 and 2008 to examine the...

In June 2008, the European Commission (EC) was enabled to introduce a settlement procedure that aims at promoting the procedural efficiency of cartel enforcement in the European Union (EU). We use a data set consisting of 84 cartels decided by the EC from 2000 to 2014 to empirically investigate...