Answering the Call of the European Court of Justice in Eurofoods a Proposed Package of Due Process Rights with a View Toward the 2012 Revision of the European Insolvency Regulation. IES WORKING PAPER 3/2011

This paper anticipates the 2012 revision of the European Insolvency Regulation, which is the sole Union legislation on the subject of cross border insolvency proceedings. The paper first describes the historical background of the Regulation. The salient point of the historical discussion is that the Regulation is the product of forty years of negotiation and arises from a historical context that is no longer applicable to current economic realities, i.e. it provides for liquidation, not reorganization, it doesn’t deal with cross border groups of companies, and it lacks an effective mechanism for transparency and creditor participation. The paper then reviews the unique hybrid jurisdictional system of concurrent universal and territorial proceedings that the Regulation imposes. It looks at this scheme from a practical viewpoint, i.e. what issues arise with concurrent proceedings in two states, involving the same assets, the same creditors, and the same company. The paper then focuses on a significant issue raised by the European Court of Justice in the Eurofoods case, i.e. the need to comply with fundamental due process principles that, while not articulated in the Regulation, lie at the core of Union law. Specifically, the paper considers the ramifications of the Court’s holding that “a Member State may refuse to recognize insolvency proceedings opened in another Member State where the decision to open the proceedings was taken in flagrant breach of the fundamental right to be heard.” In response to the Court’s direction, this paper proposes a package of due process rights, consisting principally of an accessible, efficient and useful insolvency database, the infrastructure of which already exists, but the content and use of which has not yet been developed. As part of a cohesive three part due process package, the paper also proposes the formation of cross border creditors' committees and the establishment of a European Insolvency Administrator. Finally, on the institutional level, this paper proposes that the revision of the Regulation and the development of the insolvency database not only need to be coordinated, but need to be conceptualized, managed and undertaken, not as the separate efforts of diverse institutions, but as a single, unified endeavor.

A macro-financial analysis of the euro area sovereign bond market. National Bank of Belgium Working Paper No. 259, June 2014

We estimate the 'fundamental' component of euro area sovereign bond yield spreads, i.e. the part of bond spreads that can be justified by country-specific economic factors, euro area economic fundamentals, and international influences. The yield spread decomposition is achieved using a multi-market, no-arbitrage affine term structure model with a unique pricing kernel. More specifically, we use the canonical representation proposed by Joslin, Singleton, and Zhu (2011) and introduce next to standard spanned factors a set of unspanned macro factors, as in Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton (2013). The model is applied to yield curve data from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain over the period 2005-2013. Overall, our results show that economic fundamentals are the dominant drivers behind sovereign bond spreads. Nevertheless, shocks unrelated to the fundamental component of the spread have played an important role in the dynamics of bond spreads since the intensification of the sovereign debt crisis in the summer of 2011

The EU deal to avoid Brexit: Take it or leave. CEPS Special Report No. 131/February 2016

Beyond the drama of the European Council summit of 18-19 February 2016, what became clear was the fundamental desire on the part of the leaders of all 28 EU member states to agree a deal on the British government’s demands for a renegotiated settlement on the UK’s relationship within the European Union. The deal has provided David Cameron with the political capital he needed to call a date for the in/out referendum and to lead a campaign for the UK to stay in the EU. Yet, for all the technical reforms packed into it, the deal is neither a crowd pleaser nor a vote winner. It does, however, mark a watershed acknowledgement that EU integration is not a one-directional process of ‘ever closer union’. In this CEPS Special Report, Stefani Weiss and Steven Blockmans analyse the substance of the “Decision of the Heads of State or Government, meeting within the European Council, concerning a New Settlement for the United Kingdom within the European Union” and shed light on its legal character. They contextualise this EU deal to avoid Brexit, and draw on the conclusions reached in a simulation of European Council negotiations between representatives of think tanks in the European Policy Institutes Network (EPIN), conducted by CEPS and the Bertelsmann Stiftung in October 2015.

Grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit im Alpenraum: Wechselwirkung zwischen EUSALP und EVTZ? = Transnational cooperation in the Alpine region: interaction between EUSALP and EGTC? EDAP 2/2016

The Treaty of Lisbon (2009) explicitly added - in Article 3 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and Article 174 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) - the principle of territorial cohesion to the already existing principles of social and economic cohesion between the EU Member States. To concretely reach the objective of territorial cohesion, the EU created – on the one hand - the legal instrument of the “European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation” adopted through regulation n. 1082/2006 (EGTC). This allows cross-border cooperation between local and regional authorities. On the other hand, in 2009 a new form of European transnational cooperation has been introduced, the so called Macro Regional Strategy (MRS). This was firstly applied to the Baltic Sea Region in order to give to this cross - border geographical area a coordinated framework in specific policy fields, such as the environment and the infrastructures. Both concepts - EGTC and MRS - are based on the fundamental idea of supporting the territorial and cross - border cooperation between local, regional and national authorities and other stakeholders. Despite this common aspect, the two instruments differ profoundly in terms of form, structure and content. While the MRS is to be considered as a political integrated framework without its own financial resources, the instrument of the EGTC is based on a stable legal basis. To this extent, the alpine region - a large geographic area in the heart of Europe with a longstanding tradition in crossborder cooperation - represents an interesting practical example with regard to the implementation of these two forms of cooperation across borders. In fact, the countries and regions in the Alpine area are unified through the Alps and face, therefore, common challenges: that is why this “region” is ideally suited to be the ground for experiments regarding transnational tools and strategies.