Stability and Change in the Effects of Female Educational Attainment on the Risk of Union Dissolution. A Seventeen-Country Comparison

In this paper we explore the changes in the relationship between female educational attainment and the risk of union disruption in seventeen countries: Austria, Estonia, Finland, Flanders (Belgium), France, West-Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. We start from the hypothesis presented by William J. Goode (1962; 1979; 1993), stating that in the Western countries, the initially positive relationship between social class and divorce would gradually change during the modernization process and waning of barriers to divorce, so that eventually there would either be no relationship between the two, or that the lower classes would divorce more. We expand the examination to all unions - not just marriages - due to the increasing importance of non-marital cohabitation in many of our countries. We run separate models for all unions. We first analyse the data within each of the seventeen countries with discrete-time event-history analyses. We find important variation across countries in the relationship between education and union disruption, and find that the relationship has become more negative in five countries. Second, we use multi-level models for event-histories in discrete time to examine the macro-level correlates of this variation. We report that a higher level of employment in service sector and higher percentages of economically active women are associated with a more negative relationship between education and union disruption. Overall, we find support - although not unanimous - for Goode’s hypothesis, and conclude that the waning of social, and economic barriers to union disruption increases the risk of union disruption relatively more among the less educated

Trade agreements, regulatory sovereignty and democratic legitimacy

Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through bilateral or plurilateral mechanisms to address regulatory differences, and to identify what, if any, role trade agreements can play in supporting international regulatory cooperation. This paper reflects on experience to date in regulatory cooperation and the provisions of recent trade agreements involving advanced economies that have included regulatory cooperation. We argue for a re-thinking by trade officials of the modalities and design of trade negotiations and the incorporation of institutional mechanisms that draw on insights of experimentalist governance approaches to enhance the scope for international regulatory cooperation

Growing the pie or slicing it differently : on the need to disentangle two aspects of trade agreements

Recent trade negotiations frequently include investor protection clauses. The currently stalled TTIP negotiations are but one example for this trend. Against the background of an analysis of the case for trade, the paper asks whether such clauses can be justified from a normative perspective. More specifically, what is the impact of investor protection on the domestic distribution of the gains from trade between labour and capital, and how should we assess this impact from the perspective of justice? In order to answer this question, the paper develops a series of ideal-type scenarios that reflect the consequences of investor protection on employment on the one hand, and on the distributive conflict between labour and capital on the other. While no claim is made which of these scenarios corresponds to TTIP or other trade agreements, they provide a useful normative framework to analyse such agreements

Essays on financial stability

Defence date: 31 May 2017Examining Board: Prof. Elena Carletti, EUI & Bocconi University (Supervisor); Prof. David K. Levine, EUI; Prof. Bruno Maria Parigi, University of Padua; Prof. Hans Degryse, University of LeuvenThis thesis consists of two essays concerning how banking regulations may promote financial stability. The first chapter investigates the competition-concentration-stability nexus from a novel perspective, by considering how concentration and, inter alia competition, affect the likelihood of an individual bank failing, and the likelihood of the bank failure spreading contagiously to the rest of the banking system. Competition is shown to reduce individual bank and systemic stability by reducing banks' profit buffers to absorb liquidity shocks. The impact of concentration on stability is more nuanced however, as increased concentration increases banks' profit buffers but also increases the concentration risk in the interbank market, widening the channel of contagion by which a liquidity shock can spread throughout the network. The second chapter concerns optimal ex-ante prudential regulation and ex-post resolution policy of globally systemically important banks. It characterises the conditions under which weakly capitalised, limitedly liable banks have incentives to 'gamble for resurrection' by investing in risky asset portfolios, in the knowledge that the downside risk is shifted onto the deposit insurance fund. In this context it is shown that a bank resolution by `bailing in' unsecured debt holders can restore the incentive for banks to act prudently, and that the bail-in should occur above the point of insolvency to ensure the bank has sufficient skin in the game. The interplay of three ex-ante prudential regulatory instruments is analysed: the minimum capital and total loss absorbing capacity requirements and the minimum capital buffer. The minimum capital and TLAC requirements are set to ensure that the bank has sufficient skin in the game to invest prudently and tradeoff the ex-post costs of bailing in unsecured debt holders, the cost of bailing out depositors and the cost of equity issuance, and minimum equity buffer is set to ensure an appropriate trigger for resolution.--1. Competition, concentration and contagion; --2. Debt, equity and moral hazard: the optimal structure of banks' loss absorbing capacit

Moving the electricity transmission system towards a decarbonised and integrated Europe : missing pillars and roadblocks

The establishment of a seamless electricity transmission system and the completion of a single market for electricity in Europe are currently hindered by the lack of adequate answers to several, often basic, questions concerning the coordination of actions and decisions, the sharing of costs and benefits, and solidarity beyond costs and benefits. This research report, prepared by the Florence School of Regulation, looks at the development of the past decades and identifies the existence of three core ‘missing pillars’ which explain, at least partially, why the European electricity system is affected by numerous blocking factors. The report presents two case studies that show the importance and utility of looking at what is blocking the integration and the decarbonisation of the European electricity sector through the lens of coordination, sharing and solidarity. By doing that, the report offers a set of non-technical recommendations that points out key roles, tasks and responsibilities at national and European level for removing the two ‘roadblocks’ represented, on the one hand, by redispatching costs and, on the other, by capacity adequacy and electricity crisis management

Addressing the demand-side of trafficking in the domestic work sector main findings at European level

In Europe, the employment of domestic workers is a widespread phenomenon. Despite different national policies and regulations, domestic workers, in majority migrant women, still face vulnerability to exploitation – including cases of human trafficking. Trafficking is this sector is an area neglected by policy makers and law enforcement and this situation is exacerbated by the challenges of monitoring activities occurring within private households. This policy brief examines the demand-side of trafficking in the domestic work sector in Europe based on seven country studies. It calls for a comprehensive approach in addressing demand in anti-trafficking efforts—at the intersection of trafficking, labour, and migration frameworks.This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement No. 612869

Implementing the UNGPs in the European Union : towards an open method of coordination for business and human rights

The paper examines the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the European Union via National Action Plans (NAPs). We argue that some of the procedural and substantive shortcomings currently observed in the implementation process could effectively be addressed through the Open Method of Coordination – a governance instrument that the EU has already successfully used in other policy domains such as employment, social protection and education. Section two sketches out the polycentric global governance approach envisaged by the UNGPs and discusses the institutional and policy background of their implementation in the European Union. Section three provides an assessment of EU Member State National Action Plans on business and human rights, as benchmarked against international NAP guidance. Section four relates experiences with the existing NAP process to the policy background and rationale of the Open Method of Coordination and discusses the conditions for employing the OMC in the business and human rights domain. Against this background, section five make some more concrete proposals for developing an Open Method of Coordination on Business and Human Rights

European governance of citizenship and nationality

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.The ability of a state to determine who its citizens are is a core element of sovereignty, yet even in this area coordination in the European Union has arisen as member states adjust their policies regarding citizenship acquisition and loss to take into account the European project. Furthermore, EU citizenship grants extensive rights that member states must respect, though the only way to become an EU citizen and acquire these rights remains through citizenship of a member state. This article sketches the development of EU citizenship from the 1950s to the present, mapping its evolution onto the phases of European governance utilised in this special issue. The search for closer coordination and common guidelines concerning citizenship flows from functional needs inevitably generated by superimposing a new supranational political community over existing national ones, resulting in shared governance within the framework of member state autonomy. Though welfare states and social systems in Europe remain national and jurisprudence safeguards the ability of member states to exclude individuals despite shared EU citizenship, legal judgments emphasise that member state competence concerning citizenship must be exercised in accordance with the Treaties and that member state decisions about naturalisation and denaturalisation are amenable to judicial review carried out in the light of EU law