Can structural reforms help Europe?

Can Structural Reforms Help Europe?∗

Structural reforms that reduce product and labor market markups in peripheral Europe by 10 percentage points can improve competitiveness in that region and boost unionwide output by almost 5%. If implemented during a crisis that takes the nominal interest rate to its lower bound, however, these reforms have short-run contractionary effects of more than 1% on impact, thus deepening the recession...

Panel 14: Adjusting to Europe: the Politics of Structural Reforms

Ash dieback epidemic in Europe: How can molecular technologies help?

An epidemic of ash dieback disease has spread east to west across Europe, first being noted in Poland in 1992 [1]. The disease is caused by the ascomycete fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus (also previously known as Chalara fraxinea and H. pseudoalbidus). This is one of several tree pathogens and insect pests that are recent newcomers to Europe caused by worldwide movements of plants and woody mate...

Compulsory Schooling Reforms and Fertility in Europe

We study the relationship between education and fertility, exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in Europe as source of exogenous variation in education. Using data from 8 European countries, we assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological kids and the incidence of childlessness. We find that more education causes a substantial decrease in childlessness and an increase in...

Enforcing Grammatical Restrictiveness Can Help Resolve Structural Ambiguity*

Two major issues in formal language learnability are the problem of learning restrictive distributions (sometimes known as the “subset problem”), and the problem of structural ambiguity. While substantial progress has been made in addressing each of these problems in isolation, a complication can arise when a learner is faced with a learning situation that exhibits both problems. It is possible...