The Contents and Timing of a European Banking Union: Reflections on the differing views. CEPS Essay (No. 2), 30 November 2012

Although views differ on the precise contents and timing of a genuine banking union, there is wide political agreement in principle on the need for three basic and vital elements: European bank supervision, a European deposit guarantee scheme (DGS) and a European bank resolution mechanism. In this CEPS Essay, H. Onno Ruding offers his personal views on the progress achieved to date, the outstanding issues that will prove the most difficult to resolve and recommendations on the way forward.

Germany and the Eurocrisis: The timing of politics and the politics of timing. ACES Cases No. 2014.3

This paper speculates on the future of the euro. It uses Germany as a prism for the discussion about what might be done next to bolster the Euro. Researching the future—always a challenging task—is made harder when multiple state actors contend for prominence on the basis of shifting coalitions at home, all while interacting at an international level. That said, almost everyone accepts that German choices will play the central role in the path ultimately chosen. This paper thus foregrounds Germany’s role in shaping the way ahead, and it does so through an explicitly political framework focused primarily on the electoral implausibility of an alternative German policy course.

Offshoring of Information-intensive Services: Structural Breaks in Industry Life Cycles. ACES Working Papers, August 2010

The emergence of widespread offshoring of information-intensive services is arguably one of the more impactful phenomena to transform business in the last ten years. A growing body of research has examined the firm-level drivers andlocation factors (i.e., the why's and where's) of services offshoring. However, little empirical research has examined the maturation sequencing (or when's) of services offshoring. Adopting industry life cycle theory as a framework, the key research questions examined in the paper are: when do different categories of offshoring services provision change from being emergent sectors to more mature ones, and how does the timing of this sequence relate to the type of service offshored. Using a database of 1420 offshore services FDI projects, we find that the value-add as well as the information sensitivity of the service category are related to when the service categories progress through the industry life cycle. Implications for future waves of service offshoring are discussed.

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