National Role Conceptions and Foreign Policies: France and Germany Compared. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 02.4, 2002

In spite of domestic and international political changes, French and German foreign policies have displayed high degrees of continuity between the late 1950s and the mid-1990s. Over the same time period, the directions of the two states’ foreign policies have also continued to differ from each other. Why do states similar in many respects often part ways in what they want and do? This article argues that the French and German national role conceptions (NRCs) account for both of these continuities. NRCs are domestically shared understandings regarding the proper role and purpose of one’s own state as a social collectivity in the international arena. As internal reference systems, they affect national interests and foreign policies. This article reestablishes the NRC concept, empirically codes it for France and Germany for the time period under consideration, and demonstrates comparatively how different NRCs lead to varying interests and policies across the major policy areas in security, defense, and armament.

The Politics of Budget Consolidation in Britain and Germany: the Impact of Blame-Avoidance Opportunities. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 05.2, 2005

According to parts of the literature, blame avoidance opportunities, i.e. the necessity and applicability of blame avoidance strategies, may differ among countries according to the respective institutional set-ups and between governing parties according to their programmatic orientation. In countries with many veto actors, a strategy of "Institutional Cooperation" among these actors is expected to diffuse blame sufficiently to render other blame avoidance strategies obsolete. In contrast, governments in Westminster democracies should resort to the more unilateral strategies of presentation, policy design and timing. At the same time, parties of the left are expected to have an easier time implementing spending cuts while right parties are less vulnerable when proposing tax increases. Evidence from the politics of budget consolidation in Britain and Germany does not corroborate these hypotheses. Instead, it seems that party competition conditions the effects institutions and the partisan complexion of governments have on the politics of blame avoidance.

Extending Working Lives: A comparative analysis of how governments influence lifelong learning, CEPS Special Report No. 111, July 2015

This report offers a comparative policy study on adult learning within the scope of complementary research conducted by Beblavý et al. (2013) on how people upgrade their skills during their adult lifetimes. To achieve our objectives, we identified regulatory policies and financial support in 11 countries for two main categories of learning: formal higher education and employer-based training. Drawing upon the results of the country reports carried out by our partners in the MoPAct project, we found that in none of the countries examined is there an ‘older student’ policy. In most cases grants and financial support are awarded only up until a certain age. In all of the countries studied, standard undergraduate and post-graduate studies are available for part-time students. The distribution of full-time students and part-time students in tertiary education varies from one country to another as well as from one age group to another. The participation in full-time tertiary education programmes decreases with the age of students. In Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and the UK, there are no mandatory policies to ensure employer-based training. However, in Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, employer-based training is more clearly regulated and the employers might have obligations to provide training for their staff. Taking into consideration Beblavý et al. (2013), we observe that comparative differences across countries can be related to policy differences only in some cases. The policy framework seems to impact more the employer-based training than the educational attainment (upgrade of ISCED level). In Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Poland, we find a perfect match between policy outcomes and the results of Beblavý et al. (2013) related to employer-based training. This is not the case in the United Kingdom, where the two aspects observed are not correlated.

Digital workers by design? An example from the on-demand economy. CEPS Working Document No. 414/October 2015 Monday, 19 October 2015

Recent organisational and technological changes à la Uber have generated a new labour market fringe: a digital class of workers and contractors. In this paper we study the case of CoContest, a crowdsourcing platform for interior design. Our objective is to investigate how profitable this type of work can be, also from a cross-country perspective, and why professionals choose to supply work on such a platform. Given the low returns, one might expect to see a pattern of northern employer/southern contractor. Yet analysis reveals a more nuanced pattern, in which designers supply their work even if they live in Italy, which is a high-income country. For these designers work on CoContest can make sense if they are new to the labour market and face high entry barriers, although crowdsourcing does not offer them profitable employment full time. The case of Serbia, the second-largest supplier of designers, is different, however. As a result of differences in purchasing power, if the market grows experienced Serbian designers can expect to make a living from crowdsourced contracts.

Filling the gap: open economy considerations for more reliable potential output estimates. Bruegel Working Paper 2015/11, October 2015

This paper argues that the Phillips curve relationship is not sufficient to trace back the output gap, because the effect of excess demand is not symmetric across tradeable and non-tradeable sectors. In the non-tradeable sector, excess demand creates excess employment and inflation via the Phillips curve, while in the tradeable sector much of the excess demand is absorbed by the trade balance. We set up an unobserved-components model including both a Phillips curve and a current account equation to estimate ‘sustainable output’ for 45 countries. Our estimates for many countries differ substantially from the potential output estimates of the European Commission, IMF and OECD. We assemble a comprehensive real-time dataset to estimate our model on data which was available in each year from 2004-15. Our model was able to identify correctly the sign of pre-crisis output gaps using real time data for countries such as the United States, Spain and Ireland, in contrast to the estimates of the three institutions, which estimated negative output gaps real-time, while their current estimates for the pre-crisis period suggest positive gaps. In the past five years the annual output gap estimate revisions of our model, the European Commission, IMF, OECD and the Hodrick-Prescott filter were broadly similar in the range of 0.5-1.0 percent of GDP for advanced countries. Such large revisions are worrisome, because the European fiscal framework can translate the imprecision in output gap estimates into poorly grounded fiscal policymaking in the EU.

Macroprudential supervision: from theory to policy. Bruegel Working Paper 2015/15, November 2015

While there is now consensus that financial supervision has to focus on the aggregate (macroprudential), in addition to the individual (microprudential), there is no agreed macroprudential framework for measuring financial imbalances and applying policies to correct such imbalances. This paper focuses on these two open questions in the so-called time dimension of macroprudential policy.

The dynamics of leniency application and the knock-on effect of cartel enforcement. Bruegel Working Paper 2016/02, February 2016

The authors study the timing of leniency applications using a novel application of multi-spell discrete-time survival analysis for a sample of cartels prosecuted by the European Commission between 1996 and 2014. The start of a Commission investigation does not affect the rate by which conspirators apply for leniency in the market investigated, but increases the rate of application in separate markets in which a conspirator in the investigated market also engaged in collusion. The revision of the Commission’s leniency programme in 2002 increased the rate of pre-investigation applications. Our results shed light on enforcement efforts against cartels and other forms of