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Economic resilience is essential to better withstand adverse shocks and reduce the economic costs associated with them. We propose different measures of resilience and empirically gauge how countries differ in their shock absorption capacity conditioning on the quality of their economic structures. The paper finds robust evidence that sound labour and product markets, framework conditions and political institutions increase the resilience towards adverse shocks and reduce the incidence of crisis more generally. In the presence of a common shock, a country with weaker economic structures can on average suffer up to twice the output loss in a given year compared to the country at frontier of institutional parameters. In a similar fashion, the likelihood of a severe economic crisis is reduced significantly if a country exhibits most flexible and adaptable institutions. The above exercises can be used to establish a governance process towards more resilient economic structures (as e.g. suggested for the euro area in the so?called Five Presidents' Report).

Lobbying can provide policy makers with important sector-specific information and thereby facilitating informed decisions. If going far beyond this, in particular if successfully influencing policy makers to unnecessarily tighten regulation or not opening already excessively regulated markets, it could potentially reduce overall economic welfare. We create a unique firm-level database on EU lobby activity and firm characteristics. We tend to find that firms in more protected sector, e.g. firms from non-tradable or higher regulated sectors tend to spend more for lobby activities. Also such firms tend to have higher profit margins and lower productivity, as often the case in sheltered sectors.