Suchergebnisse

This study examines the role that expected unemployment insurance benefits play in explaining the duration of individual unemployment spells. Based on a detailed legal review of benefit rules applicable in nine European countries during the second part of the 1990s, we define 90 profiles of expected unemployment benefits which indicate what levels and durations of unemployment insurance benefits are expected, at each month of unemployment, by workers entering unemployment in each of these countries. The impact of the expected benefit profiles on the hazard of exiting unemployment is estimated using the data of the eight waves of the European Community Household Panel and applying a discrete-time two-level event history model, nesting unemployment spells within the corresponding profiles of expected unemployment benefits. Our key explanatory variable is an innovative indicator of the generosity of unemployment benefits, initially proposed by Ray et al. (1986), which sums, at each month of the unemployment spell, the discounted monthly replacement rates expected over the remaining compensation period. Results confirm that more generous expected levels of unemployment benefits are associated with lower hazards of exiting unemployment and indicate that there is significant variation in the hazard of exiting unemployment among spells nested in different profiles of expected unemployment benefits. ; Cette thèse se propose de montrer le rôle potentiel des perspectives d?indemnisation d?assurance chômage, en tant que facteur explicatif de la durée du chômage. Ces perspectives concernent l?évolution, au fil de la période d?indemnisation, des taux attendus de remplacement de l?ancien salaire par les allocations chômage, telle que cette évolution est fixée par les règles d?indemnisation en vigueur dans chaque pays, au moment de l?entrée au chômage de chaque chômeur. Grâce à une revue détaillée des barèmes d?indemnisation applicables durant la deuxième moitié des années ?90 dans neuf pays de l?Union Européenne, 90 ...

Defence date: 6 June 2017 ; Examining Board: Professor Sven Steinmo, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Mark Blyth, Brown University; Professor Philipp Genschel, European University Institute; Professor Leonard Seabrooke, Copenhagen Business School ; For all its powers, we know little about how the European Central Bank (ECB) makes its decisions and why. In light of its ever-increasing importance in European governance and the criticism this has attracted, this is particularly regrettable. Often a welcome scapegoat, the ECB has been accused of doing first too little, then too late. Compared to other major central banks, the ECB has indeed long been a laggard – regarding both conventional interest rate policies and unconventional balance sheet operations. Why? I argue that central bankers' policy experiments after the financial crisis are a prime example of policymaking under conditions of Knightian uncertainty. Faced with an unprecedented situation, central bankers were unable to draw on historical experience and had to resort to their beliefs about how the economy works instead. Based on a survey among 422 central bank economists, I quantify these different ways of thinking. My survey data shows a) that certain beliefs matter for policy preferences and b) that both are unevenly distributed among central banks. In particular, the ECB leans more towards orthodox beliefs and hawkish inflation preferences than the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. It is considerably more conservative. Within the Eurosystem, different national central banks are clustered regarding both beliefs and preferences, revealing a dividing line in economic philosophy between core and periphery. This suggests that the frequently surfacing conflicts inside the ECB's Governing Council reflect a battle of ideas rather than a conflict of interests between creditor and debtor states. Proponents of activist monetary policy at the ECB had to overcome enormous resistance from within before they could follow the examples set by others. I argue that this is why the ECB first did too little to support the economy, and only changed its orthodox stance very late.

Chapter 9 ; It was not surprising that Malta included initiatives in the maritime sector in its six-month presidency priorities. As an island state at the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, Malta could hardly sidestep the sector. The justification for its inclusion was couched in much broader political terms: that the EU was increasingly becoming dependant on the seas and hence the need to further strengthen the maritime sector under the EU Integrated Maritime Policy (IMP). In the words of the "Maltese Priorities", the oceans offered "a diverse spectrum of innovative research and commercial activities that could be developed into high value-added job opportunities in line with the Blue Growth Initiative towards growth and competitiveness". In this respect, the Maltese Priorities mentioned two concrete steps: international ocean governance aiming to secure "political endorsement on the way forward on a more coherent, comprehensive and effective EU policy to improve the international ocean governance framework and the sustainability of our oceans"; and the launching of the Western Mediterranean Initiative (Government of Malta, 2017). In its appraisal of the performance of the Maltese presidency of the Council of the EU in the maritime sector, the newspaper Politico gave Malta a 10/10. The same source described as a "crowning achievement" a political agreement reached on technical measures to limit fishing (Politico, 2017). This agreement was reached on 11 May 2017, when according to a Council statement, "the Agriculture and Fisheries Council agreed on a common position on a proposal for new rules on the conservation of fishery resources and the protection of marine ecosystems, often referred to as 'technical measures'." The decision is intended to permit the modernization of existing rules on how and where fishermen fish and regulate the landing of fisheries resources, technical specifications of fishing gear and measures to protect depleted fish species. [excerpt] ; peer-reviewed

The EU is currently facing some fundamental challenges: the euro and refugee crises are still unresolved, the solidarity between Member States is eroding, and nationalist forces are growing as support for European integration is diminishing. The union appears too heterogeneous, and the economic and political interests of the 28 Member States too diverse, to be able to address these challenges as a whole. Does the concept of differentiated integration offer a possible solution? Can such differentiation offer the European integration project a better and more stable future? Which measures of diversity and flexibility can the "ever closer Union among the peoples of Europe" endure? Or will such differentiation ultimately damage the joint European project? This collection of leading European lawyers tackles these questions and suggests how they might be addressed. --

This study evaluates the performance of a selection of Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs), and Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities Funds (UCITS) which followed a global geographic focus strategy during the period 2010-2016. These two fund structures are governed by different regulatory frameworks, which have evolved and re-shaped over the years. Various yardsticks are employed to evaluate the risk-adjusted performance of the sampled funds, and Monte-Carlo simulations are used to gauge the possible out-of-sample returns. Most of the sampled funds underperformed the benchmark index in terms of their Sharpe and Treynor ratios. Whilst UCITS registered a better overall performance, AIFs outperformed UCITS towards the end of the sample period. This suggests that investors should not assume that one fund structure is inherently superior to the other, since the relative performance may vary over time. ; peer-reviewed

Defence date: 7 June 2010 ; Awarded the François Mény Prize for the Best Comparative Study of Political Institutions, 2011 ; Examining Board: David Farrell (UCD), Mark Franklin (EUI), Adrienne Héritier (EUI/RSCAS) (Supervisor), Simon Hix (LSE) ; Awarded the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Prize for Best Dissertation in EU studies: the thesis marks a substantial contribution not only to the literature on parliaments in general and the European Parliament in particular, but also to the understanding of the democratic deficit in Europe and how it might be tackled. ; First made available online: 27 August 2021 ; The European Parliament (EP) now acts as an equal co-legislator with the Council of Ministers in adopting many policies that affect 500 million European citizens on a daily basis. However, the parliamentary legislative organisation is under-researched despite its profound consequences for EU policies and policy-making. Addressing this gap, this thesis studies the internal setup and legislative impact of the EP committees. Drawing on congressional literature, I confront distributive, informational and partisan theoretical approaches to answer the research questions of this project, namely whether and why the EP committees and their legislative output are dominated by preference-outlying legislators with special interests, experts serving the informational needs of the plenary, or loyal members of the working majority party group (coalition). Statistical analyses of committee assignments, allocation of legislative tasks, and adoption of committee reports in plenary are conducted using data on the 6th European Parliament (2004-2009). They are complemented with evidence from semi-structured interviews. The results show that legislators' special interests and expertise account for the formally regulated assignment to committees depending on the predominant character of their legislative output (distributive or regulatory). In contrast, party group affiliation and loyalty shape the allocation of important legislative tasks in committees, owing to the informal allocation process. Furthermore, committee reports are more successful on the floor if drafted by rapporteurs from the working majority party group - perhaps a natural consequence of the EP open amendment rule. Thus, the parliamentary legislative output is ultimately controlled by the working majority party group and not committees. The congressional rationales fail to account for committees' legislative influence when an informal early agreement is reached with the Council of Ministers. This occurs increasingly often, rendering decision-making in committees largely obsolete. The observed regularities are used to advance the literature on legislative organisation by identifying conditions under which each of the main congressional rationales can explain committee setup and influence, namely: 1) the policy areas a committee covers; 2) the parliamentary rules regulating committee-party and committee-plenary relationships; and 3) the balance of power and mode of negotiation between the legislative chambers. More substantively, the EP committees are not conducive for pursuing particularistic policies. Instead, they promote left-right party politics. This has important implications for EU legislative politics, interest representation, legitimacy, and more generally the EU democratic deficit.