Economic Logic

The border effect describes a striking feature of the data on trade volumes. Volumes typically decrease with distance traveled, with a jump ...

The general thinking is that if you want to create a monetary union, a strong prerequisite is that the business cycles in the involved econo...

The theory of optimal currency areas initiated by Robert Mundell states that a monetary union should be beneficial between regions that have...

The banking crisis in Cyprus has been handled very poorly, few would disagree. There was foremost a deplorable approach to naming things, fo...

Over the past decade or so, there has been a trend for European countries to drift toward the right on the political spectrum. Even nominall...

If you have traveled across Europe before the introduction of the Euro, you have certainly been annoyed by the frequent changing of currenci...

25 years ago, it was very rare to see a car with Eastern European plates in Western Europe. Now, they are all over the place, including truc...

The situation in Greece is rapidly getting worse, with clear signs that a bank run is in the works, mainly because there is no party majorit...

Europe has suffered a brain drain of top academic scientists that it has tried to reverse by offering better work conditions. The main compe...

Entrepreneurship is the driver of growth and wealth, or at least an important driver. This is why so many initiatives are geared towards mak...

European leaders are currently struggling over a package to save the Euro, pouring large amounts of money into funds that should stabilize t...

What triggered the Industrial Revolution has been the subject of debates for decades. While currently the emphasis is on the Unified Growth ...

We know rather well how frequently bank notes change hands, simply by computing the velocity of money from the money supply and some aggrega...

There is an endless stream of papers trying to understand why, on average, unemployment rates are higher in Europe than in North America. I ...

There is now much talk about reforming market institutions in order to prevent crises. Whether those reforms will have an impact remains to ...

Over the last fifty years, the labor market of the major European countries went through a remarkable transformation: while Europeans worked...

Now that the US has passed this unfortunate bailout package, other governments around the world are eager to pursue similar policies. This i...

One of the big challenges of Economic history is to explain why, a thousand years ago, Asia, and in particular China, suddenly stagnated and...

Monaco has a tiny territory and is bursting. To expand, it seems to have nowhere to go but the sea, à la the Netherlands. And this seems exa...

Slovakia is now a virtual lock for joining the Euro next year, missing just a formality (a ministerial meeting). But the approval comes with...