Publications by PSE researchers

The literature on the growth effects of European integration remains inconclusive. This is due to severe methodological difficulties mostly driven by country heterogeneity. This paper addresses these concerns using the synthetic control method. It constructs counterfactuals for countries that joined the European Union (EU) from 1973 to 2004. We find that growth effects from EU membership are large and positive, with Greece as the exception. Despite substantial variation across countries and over time, we estimate that without European integration, per capita incomes would have been, on average, approximately 10% lower in the first ten years after joining the EU.

Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) suffered a sharp contraction in their borrowing from banks during the Great Recession. Analyzing a large firm‐level database for European countries, the paper shows that trade credit amplified the liquidity squeeze on SMEs, with adverse effects on their real activity. SMEs sharply increased their net trade credit and thus transferred financial resources to larger firms. Given the large weight of SMEs in the economy of European countries, the liquidity squeeze of SMEs likely contributed to the depth of the output fall and the slow recovery in Europe during the Great Recession.

This paper presents a dissonant view on post-war British economic performance. A defining feature is the decline of the UK relative to the six founding members of the European Union after 1945. However, this relative decline stopped. The conventional view is that a turning point occurs in the mid-1980s when Mrs Thatcher implements far-reaching structural reforms. This paper asks whether econometric evidence supports this conventional view and finds it does not. We then examine an alternative hypothesis: this turning point occurs around 1970 when the UK joined the European Community. We find strong econometric support for this view. The intuition we offer is that EU membership signalled the prominence of business groups that chose to compete at the high-tech end of the common European market against those business groups that preferred comparative advantage-driven Commonwealth markets (mostly former colonies). Those pro-Europe business groups later become the constituency that provides support for Mrs Thatcher’s reforms. Without this vital support, we argue Mrs Thatcher’s structural reforms would not have been nearly as effective, if proposed and implemented at all.

This book brings together contributions from leading scholars around the world on the most relevant and pressing economic themes surrounding the UK–EU relationship. With chapters spanning from the UK’s accession to the bloc to the aftermath of its decision to leave, the book explores key themes in UK economic growth and EU membership, international trade, foreign direct investment, financial markets and migration. Chapters interrogate the history of the relationship, the depth of foreign direct investment, and responses to the financial crisis. Considering both the history and future of UK and EU relations, the book is a relevant and timely volume that gives welcome context to a fast-changing relationship.

The Great Recession has generated renewed interest in the phenomenon of creditless recoveries. This paper studies the mechanisms behind such phenomenon, analyzing data on industries for a large set of countries over a forty year period from 1963 to 2003. We find that during creditless recoveries there is a significant reallocation of resources away from sectors that are more dependent on bank credit, both for their investments and for their short-term liquidity needs. The adverse effects of credit constraints are softened in sectors that rely more on alternative sources of financing, such as trade credit, or in sectors that have more favorable access to credit because of higher collateral. We thus conclude that creditless recoveries do not simply reflect a natural process of deleveraging, but they may imply significant inefficiencies in the allocation of resources.

This paper discusses three policy tools to mitigate jobless recoveries during financial crises: inflation, real currency depreciation, and credit-recovery policies. Using a sample of financial crises in Emerging Market economies, we document that large inflationary spikes appear to help unemployment to get back to pre-crisis levels. However, the counterpart of inflation is sizably lower real wages. Hence, inflation does not prevent wage earners as a whole from getting hit by financial crises. Interestingly, neither the change in the real exchange rate nor the change in output composition (tradables/nontradables), from output peak to recovery point, displays a statistically significant relationship with inflation or jobless recovery. This suggests that currency depreciation can help reduce unemployment only insofar as it is associated with inflation, and that jobless recovery is likely due to nominal wage rigidity. The paper also shows that measures to reactivate credit flows could be beneficial to wage earners as a whole, as measured by the real wage bill.

The paper provides an empirical analysis of the growth performance of transition countries in a comparative perspective, separating episodes of crises from those of growth. Performance is measured by the output response following recessions, rather than average rates of growth that aggregate periods of recessions and periods of growth. Results highlight significant differences between transition and non-transition countries, and heterogeneity within the transition group. Distinguishing the performance following the so-called "transitional recession" from that of "normal recessions", the analysis allows separating the role of initial conditions, pre-transition, from the effects determined by the economic structure that emerged after the launch of market reforms. The post-recession behavior of output in Central-Eastern Europe resembles that of emerging and developing countries in the aftermath of banking and financial crises, often following significant liberalizations. In contrast, the post-crisis performance of CIS countries resembles the output response observed during episodes of civil wars, and remains significantly different from the normal response of an average market country. Therefore, the ability to rebound after a crisis is a key element of the growth performance of different transition countries. We observe that such performance depends on economic reforms and especially on the complementarities among different reforms.

What accounts for the dynamics of financial reforms? This paper identifies the political regime as main factor. Focusing on democratization and financial reform, it puts forward novel evidence for a U-shaped relation, across countries, over time as well as in a panel setting for different reform measures and a wide range of estimators. Partial democracy is a main obstacle to financial reforms and democratization, when incomplete, may lead to severe financial reform reversals. We also show that, even when de jure set off de facto financial liberalization, the political regime still play a fundamental role in the reform's implementation phase.

Most empirical studies on price setting that use micro data focus on advanced industrial countries. In this paper we analyze the experience of an emerging economy, Slovakia, using a large micro-level dataset that accounts for a substantial part of the consumer price index (about 5 million observations). We find that market structure is an important determinant of pricing behavior. The effect of market structure on persistence of inflation results from two conflicting forces. Increased competition may reduce persistence by increasing the frequency of price changes. On the contrary, higher competition may increase persistence through inertial behaviour induced by the strategic complementarity among price setters. In our case study, we find that the latter effects dominate. Indeed, the dispersion of prices is higher while persistence is lower in the non-tradable sectors, suggesting that higher competition is not conducive to lower persistence. Furthermore, we find that the frequency of price changes depends negatively on the price dispersion and positively on the product-specific inflation. These results seem consistent with predictions of Calvo's staggered price model.