News Archive

In recent years Chinese foreign acquisitions have increased significantly, with Chinese investors are more likely to acquire larger firms, firms with lower levels of profitability and higher debt.

The EU has mostly been defined as a provider of economic integration amongst participating member states. Its cornerstones have been the removal of obstacles to cross-border flows of goods, services, labour and capital, and the development of common policies that ensure the smooth functioning of an integrated market, be it for trade, competition, infrastructures or consumer protection, to name the main ones only. Even the euro was initially conceived as a natural complement to the internal market and as a trigger for further integration.

This paper by Ulrich Hege (Toulouse School of Economics) and Pierre Mella Barral (TBS Business School) examines two prominent approaches to design efficient mechanisms for debt renegotiation with dispersed bondholders: debt exchange offers that promise enhanced liquidation rights to a restricted number of tendering bondholders (favored under U.S. law), and collective action clauses that allow to alter core bond terms after a majority vote (favored under U.K. law).

In a new EconPol working paper, Andreas Backhaus and Mikkel Barslund (Centre for European Policy Studies) find that women of later working age who become grandmothers are more likely to leave the labour market than women without grandchildren. Male labour supply, however, does not significantly adjust in response to grandparenthood. The probability of women aged between 55 and 64 continuing to participate in the labour market can fall from an average of 45% to 15% after the arrival of grandchildren, according to the research.

In this working paper, António Afonso (ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa; REM – Research in Economics and Mathematics, UECE) and Frederico Silva Leal (ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa; Portuguese Economy Ministry) estimate short- and long-run elasticities of private consumption for fiscal instruments. They find that positive tax revenue elasticities indicate that consumers have a Ricardian behaviour, while social benefits appear to have a non-Keynesian effect on private consumption.