The distribution of debt across euro area countries : The role of individual characteristics, institutions and credit conditions. National Bank of Belgium Working Paper No. 252, December 2013

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount of debt held and, in the case of secured debt, the interest rate paid on the main mortgage. Second, we examine the role of legal and economic institutions in accounting for these differences. We use data from the first wave of a new survey of household finances, the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, to achieve these aims. We find that the patterns of secured and unsecured debt outcomes vary markedly across countries. Among all the institutions considered, the length of asset repossession periods best accounts for the features of the distribution of secured debt. In countries with longer repossession periods, the fraction of people who borrow is smaller, the youngest group of households borrow lower amounts (conditional on borrowing), and the mortgage interest rates paid by low-income households are higher. Regulatory loan-to-value ratios, the taxation of mortgages and the prevalence of interest-only or fixed-rate mortgages deliver less robust results.

Assessing US and EU Foreign Targeting Arab Youth: Lessons from Morocco. ACES Working Papers (progress report), August 2009

As stated in the opening sentence of the proposal submitted for the ACES grant in 2009, the research that this seed grant is supporting is ambitious and large in scale. The primary goal is to produce a book-length study that assesses the priorities and impact of European and American foreign aid targeting youth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). To date, the research undertaken with the support of the grant has helped in providing some preliminary data for a) testing few hypotheses, b) fine-tuning the research design; and c) pointing to the direction where more conceptual and ethnographic research should be undertaken.

An Investigation of Career Tenure in the European Parliament: Electoral, Party and Individual Considerations. ACES Working Papers, 2012

What explains the length of a Member of the European Parliament’s career? Little evidence of careerism has been uncovered in the European Parliament, particularly when compared to studies of legislator tenure in the U.S. Congress. Due to the different historical contexts in which these two legislatures developed, it seems reasonable to rule out many of the explanations used to account for increasing careerism in Congress in searching for the influences on legislator tenure in the European Parliament. This paper therefore proposes three potential models of careerism in the European Parliament: an electoral systems model, a party model, and an individual model. While the data necessary to test these models has not been fully compiled, this paper outlines the major hypotheses of each model and details plans for the operationalization of all independent and control variables. These models are not intended to be mutually exclusive alternatives, but rather each explanation is expected to influence each MEP in varying degrees.

Measuring ageing and the need for longer working lives in the EU. CEPS Working Document No. 417/February 2016 Wednesday, 24 February 2016

This study considers different ways of measuring the ageing of societies and their implications for public policy. The first part characterises the ongoing ageing of the population in the EU28 by relating it to past and future longer-term demographic trends for broad groups of countries. It goes beyond traditional chronological measures to include recently suggested prospective measures of ageing. The second part of the study is concerned with economic dependency ratios; a more relevant measure for summarising the economic challenges related to ageing. Three main findings emerge: first, prospective indicators of ageing reveal the challenge of population ageing to be less onerous than traditional chronological measures would suggest. Their relevance, however, will depend on the degree to which policy changes can respond to the changing age structure of the population. Second, substantial increases in the length of working lives are necessary to maintain current economic dependency ratios. Taking a year-2000 perspective view of the economic challenges of ageing shows that substantial progress has been made. Third, looking towards 2050, education will have limited direct impact on the scale of the ageing challenge.

Measuring Dependency Ratios using National Transfer Accounts. CEPS Working Document No. 420/April 2016

It is now widely recognised that the socio-economic changes that ageing societies will bring about are poorly captured by the traditional demographic dependency ratios (DDRs), such as the old-age dependency ratio that relates the number of people aged 65+ to the working-age population. Future older generations will have increasingly better health and are likely to work longer. By combining population projections and National Transfer Accounts (NTA) data for seven European countries, we project the quantitative impact of ageing on public finances until 2040 and compare it to projected DDRs. We then simulate the public finance impact of changes in three key indicators related to the policy responses to population ageing: net immigration, healthy ageing and longer working lives. We do this by linking age-specific public health transfers and labour market participation rates to changes in mortality. Four main findings emerge: first, the simple old-age dependency ratio overestimates the future public finance challenges faced by the countries studied – significantly so for some countries, e.g. Austria, Finland and Hungary. Second, healthy ageing has a modest effect (on public finances) except in the case of Sweden, where it is substantial. Third, the long-run effect of immigration is well captured by the simple DDR measure if immigrants are similar to the native population. Finally, increasing the length of working lives is central to addressing the public finance challenge of ageing. Extending the length of working lives by three to four years over the next 25 years – equivalent to the increase in life expectancy – severely limits the impact of ageing on public transfers.