What Future for the EU in the Global Trading System?

The recent phase of globalisation could be characterised as “wider”, whereas the next phase to come will be “deeper”. This new phase is likely to prove bumpier than the previous one, as the issues now at stake will have more to do with values or ethics, the interpenetration of which will be both economically necessary and politically difficult. In the medium term, the growth of the European economies will become more dependent on external trade, and thus these policy challenges will need to be addressed.     

The “Treasury View”: An (un-)expected return?

Abstract

By examining the rhetorical use of an old piece of economic theory by some contemporary economists, this paper intends to report on “how today's economists conduct a public policy debate”. This paper is neither a scholarly history of the interwar debate nor a sophisticated critique of current economic policy. It is an attempt to link the policy and theoretical arguments of two similar debates separated by nearly 80 years. The second part of the paper demonstrates that the (un-)expected return of the Treasury View is a case study illustrating two very different modelling strategies.     

The Determinants of Mergers and Acquisitions in Banking

This paper investigates the determinants associated with the likelihood of a bank becoming involved in a merger or an acquisition. Using a multinomial logistic regression and a Cox regression with time-dependent covariates, we investigate the determinants of being a target or an acquirer from a sample of 777 deals involving EU acquirers and 312 global targets over the period of 1991 to 2006. Both the multinomial logistic and Cox regressions identify the same determinants associated with becoming acquirers or targets. A higher likelihood of becoming an acquirer exists for larger banks with a history of high growth, greater cost X-efficiency, and lower capitalization. In contrast, banks are more likely to be targets if they have lower free cash flows, are less efficient, are relatively illiquid, and are under-capitalized. But, the predictive power of the two regressions is different as the multinomial logistic regression outperforms the Cox regression when predicting the likelihood of becoming an acquirer.