Economics without Borders: Economic Research for European Policy Challenges

If treated as a single economy, the European Union is the largest in the world, with an estimated GDP of over 14 trillion euros. Despite its size, European economic policy has often lagged behind the rest of the world in its ability to generate growth and innovation. Much of the European economic research itself often trails behind that of the USA, which sets much of the agenda in mainstream economics. This book, also available as open access, bridges the gap between economic research and policymaking by presenting overviews of twelve key areas for future economic policy and research. Written for the economists and policymakers working within European institutions, it uses comprehensive surveys by Europe's leading scholars in economics and European policy to demonstrate how economic research can contribute to good policy decisions, and vice versa, demonstrating how economics research can be motivated and made relevant by hot policy questions. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Laszlo Matyas is an economist and econometrician who has authored and co-authored several high impact publications in the field of panel data. Currently he is a University Professor at the Central European University, Budapest. He worked as Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Victoria, was the founding Director of the Institute for Economic Analysis, Budapest, and also served as Provost and Pro-Rector of Central European University. This is the ninth book he has edited or co-authored over the last two decades.

Richard Blundell is the David Ricardo Professor of Economics at University College London. Since 1986 he has also been Research Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). He has held visiting professor positions at the University of British Columbia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley. He holds Honorary Doctorates from Universität St Gallen, Switzerland, the Norwegian School of Economics, and Universität Mannheim, Germany. He was knighted in the 2014 Queen's New Year's Honours for services to economics and social science. His research covers the empirical analysis of consumer, savings and labour supply behaviour. He has developed new microeconometric tools for the analysis of individual decisions.

Estelle Cantillon is FNRS senior research associate at the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES), Université Libre de Bruxelles, and research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, London. Her research lies at the boundary between market design and industrial organization and typically combines theory and data. She is an Associate Editor at the Rand Journal of Economics and sits on the Economics Council of OXERA, the advisory board of WZB Berlin, and the Executive Committee of Rethinking Belgium. She co-founded the European-wide research network 'Matching in Practice', whose goal is to foster developments at the interface between theory, empirics, experiments and policy on admission procedures in education.

Barbara Chizzolini is an Assistant Professor of Econometrics at Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. She has been teaching and doing applied research in industrial organization, micro foundations, financial time series and econometrics since 1985. She has an undergraduate degree in economics and social sciences from Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, and an MA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her main contributions focus on the analysis of banks' and manufacturing firms' behaviour using latent variable models and discrete data, on regional growth econometric modelling, and on nonlinear time series models. She is a member of the Italian Econometrics Society (SIDE).

Marc Ivaldi is Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics and at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Research Fellow at the Institut d'Economie Industrielle, Toulouse, and the Center for Economic Policy Research, London, and Coordinator of the COEURE (COoperation on EUropean Research in Economics) project. He has served as a member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy at the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission and as Scientific Director of the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities at the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Specializing in applied industrial organization, he has mainly studied network and transport service industries. He is an expert on empirical methods for competition and regulation policy.