Using an extended data set of EU countries ranging from 1971-2006 and relevant econometric methods, we investigate the economic, political, and institutional determinants of government deficits in the EU. The results show a strong opportunistic behaviour of policymakers which leads to political...

Europe's increasing import dependency in natural gas facilitates a number of new infrastructure projects. However, up to now it has always been diffcult to assess the full impact of these projects as interdependencies within the whole European gas infrastructure system were hard to predict. We...

Recent studies emphasize the impact of macroeconomic factors on educational attainment. They show that although individual factors like the educational level of one's parents play a decisive role in determining the human capital accumulation of the children, the cohort size as well as the local...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the implications of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) accession of eight Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) on their share in EMU-12 imports. Overcoming biases related to endogeneity, omitted variables and sample selection, our results...

As part of its efforts to reach the targets of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission is currently considering a new directive to reduce the per-kilometer CO2 emissions of newly registered automobiles. This paper critically assesses this proposal with respect to its economic and...

We use the European Community Household Panel, a harmonized data set covering the countries of the European Union, to provide detailed estimates of the returns to education. Our results can be summarized as follows. Firstly, average returns to education have been mostly stable during the second...

The EU-wide Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), established in 2005, is a key pillar of Europe¿s strategy to attain compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Under this scheme, CO2 allowances have thus far been allocated largely free of charge. This paper demonstrates that such cost-free allocation,...

We analyse the nature of German trade-FDI linkages within the EU27 based on a simultaneous equation gravity approach for imports, exports, in- and outward FDI stocks. We adopt both a Hausman-Taylor (1981) IV approach (3SLS-GMM) and rival non-IV estimation (the system extension to the Fixed...

Policymakers in the EU member states are currently shaping rescue packages to prevent the financial crisis hitting their economies with unmitigated force. Each government is responding to the emerging problems with a country-specific set of measures. Given the global nature of the crisis, would...

This paper examines the growth effects of an increase of capital income taxes with additional revenue being devoted to cut wage-related social security contributions to reduce unemployment. The analysis is carried out in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth, unemployment and a...