EU immigration trends and policies: Spain and France as case studies. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 13 No. 10, August 2013

From the Introduction. The Treaty on European Union, also known as the Treaty of Maastricht or the Maastricht Treaty, created the European Union (EU) from the existing European Economic Community (EEC.) It was signed by the member states on February 7, 1992, and entered into force on November 1, 1993.1 Among its many innovations was the creation of European citizenship, which would be granted to any person who was a citizen of an EU member state. Citizenship, however, is intertwined with immigration, which the Treaty also attempted to address. Policy on visas, immigration and asylum was originally placed under Pillar 3 of the EU, which dealt with Justice and Home Affairs. In 1997, however, the Amsterdam Treaty moved these policies from Pillar 3 to Pillar 1, signaling “a shift toward more supranational decision-making in this area,” as opposed to the intergovernmental method of Pillars 2 and 3.2

Towards a New (European Research) Deal: The Case for Enhanced Fiscal Policy Coordination on Research and Innovation. Bruges European Economic Policy (BEEP) Briefing 20/2008

The paper reviews the evolution of research and innovation in the EU and assesses how current policies and programmes have influenced the development of Europe's research landscape. Based on existing literature, evaluation reports and practice, the paper critically examines the effectiveness of current European research funding instruments in a context of open innovation and in the presence of global spillovers. It therefore develops a subsidiarity test to assess whether current rationales still prove sufficient to justify policy intervention in this area. The paper sheds light on how to improve the effectiveness of EU action by enriching it by the use of coordinated fiscal policy for research funding. This will constitute an incentive to genuine bottom-up research, development and innovation (R&D&I) and a stimulus to local investments in innovation. The paper also assesses the potentials of a reinforced open method of coordination as well as a review of state aid law in the field of research funding in the EU.

Do agricultural subsidies crowd out or stimulate rural credit institutions? The Case of CAP Payments. Factor Markets Working Paper No. 4, September 2011

In this paper we estimate the impact of subsidies from the EU’s common agricultural policy on farm bank loans. According to the theoretical results, if subsidies are paid at the beginning of the growing season they may reduce bank loans, whereas if they are paid at the end of the season they increase bank loans, but these results are conditional on whether farms are credit constrained and on the relative cost of internal and external financing. In the empirical analysis, we use farm-level panel data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network to test the theoretical predictions for the period 1995–2007. We employ fixed-effects and generalised method of moment models to estimate the impact of subsidies on farm loans. The results suggest that subsidies influence farm loans and the effects tend to be non-linear and indirect. The results also indicate that both coupled and decoupled subsidies stimulate long-term loans, but the long-term loans of large farms increase more than those of small farms, owing to decoupled subsidies. Furthermore, the results imply that short-term loans are affected only by decoupled subsidies, and they are altered by decoupled subsidies more for small farms than for large farms; however, when controlling for endogeneity, only the decoupled payments affect loans and the relationship is non-linear.