When we refer to the EC 1992 these days we think about the introduction of the single-internal market, i.e. a market with no discrimination on the grounds ofthe nationality of buyers and sellers as far as the member countries of the EC are concerned. This tends to lead us into deep waters when...

Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the United States than in continental European countries (CEU) since the 1970s. Moreover, this inequality gap has further widened during this period as the US has experienced a large increase in wage inequality, whereas the CEU has seen only...

In this paper we use new data to describe how firms from 15 European countries organise their innovative activities. The data matches firm level accounting data with information on the patents that those firms and their subsidiaries have applied for at the European Patents Office. We describe...

In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We...

In the European Union, energy markets are increasingly being liberalized. A case in point is the European natural gas industry. The general expectation is that more competition will lead to lower prices and higher volumes, and hence higher welfare. This paper indicates that this might not happen...

European policy makers may have asked too much from regional policies: to decrease inequalities between regions, to increase efficiency at the national and European levels and to decrease inequalities between countries. This paper argues that these policies face a trade-off between equity and...

Spillovers from national industrial policies can cause helpful or harmful competition among policy makers and helpful or harmful interactions among the targeted industries. As a result, it is not in general possible to say whether industrial policy coordination is good or bad. However, reaching...

This paper analyzes the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job reallocation in a cross-country framework. In the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998) and Ciccone and Papaioannou (2006), we exploit variation in...