The eastward enlargement of the European Union will be the fifth enlargement since establishing the European Community in 1957. This paper gives an overview of the most recent undertakings to estimate the costs and benefits of EU enlargement in the framework of model analysis. This field of research is relatively young. Therefore only a few model simulations have been made so far. They can be classified into world models covering several world regions, and in single country models. In both cases, one finds computable general equilibrium - CGE - models as well as macro models. The major findings of world models are that the CE-ECs will be the winners whereas the EU incumbents can expect only small gains from enlargement. Taking into account the costs of enlargement the big question, is how the int e-gration gains are distributed among EU incumbents. As a rule, those countries will benefit the most which have already strong trade relations with the CEECs. In the case of the single country models, Austria is one of those countries with the longest tradition in making model simulations in the case of enlargement. A comparison of CGE model approaches with macro model simulations for Austria shows that the benefits of EU enlargement may be lower than those of the opening-up of Eastern Europe since 1989. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

This paper tests for the Euro zone the hypothesis put forward by Sapir and Sekkat (1999) that synchronizing elections might improve welfare. After identifying a political budget cycle in the Euro zone we build a politico-macroeconomic model and simulate the effects of adopting a common election day in the 12 Euro zone member states. The results support most of the theoretical predictions by Sapir-Sekkat: (i) Synchronizing the elections could enhance GDP growth, reduce unemployment, but leads to increased inflation and in some countries to a deterioration of the budget; higher inflation forces ECB to monetary restrictions. (ii) If the synchronization happens asymmetrically - either only in the large or only in the small Euro zone countries - the result depends on the size of the spillovers. (iii) As anticipated in Sapir -Sekkat a common election day is a further step towards the desired "European business cycle", however, at the cost of increasing its amplitude. Harmonizing elections is another method of policy coordination. Whether this leads to higher welfare is a matter of weighting the different macroeconomic outcomes and it also depends on the model applied. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

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Economic policy in the EU faces a trilemma of solving three challenges simultaneously - growth, distribution, and the environment. In order to assess policies that address these issues simultaneously, economic models need to account for both sector-sector and sector-environment feedbacks within a single framework.This paper presents a multi-sectoral stock-flow consistent (SFC) macro model where a demand-driven economy consisting of multiple institutional sectors - firms, energy, households, government, and financial - interacts with the environment. The model is calibrated for the EU region and five policy scenarios are evaluated; low consumption, a capital stock damage function, carbon taxes, higher share of renewable energy, and technological shocks to productivity. Policy outcomes are tracked on overall output, unemployment, income and income distributions, energy, and emission levels. Results show that investment in mitigation technologies allows for absolute decoupling and ensures that the above three issues can be solved simultaneously. / Series: WWWforEurope

Economic policy in the EU faces a trilemma of solving three challenges simultaneously - growth, distribution, and the environment. In order to assess policies that address these issues simultaneously, economic models need to account for both sector-sector and sector-environment feedbacks within a single framework.This paper presents a multi-sectoral stock-flow consistent (SFC) macro model where a demand-driven economy consisting of multiple institutional sectors - firms, energy, households, government, and financial - interacts with the environment. The model is calibrated for the EU region and five policy scenarios are evaluated; low consumption, a capital stock damage function, carbon taxes, higher share of renewable energy, and technological shocks to productivity. Policy outcomes are tracked on overall output, unemployment, income and income distributions, energy, and emission levels. Results show that investment in mitigation technologies allows for absolute decoupling and ensures that the above three issues can be solved simultaneously. (author's abstract) / Series: Ecological Economic Papers

This paper proposes a large Bayesian Vector Autoregressive (BVAR) model with common stochastic volatility to forecast global equity indices. Using a dataset consisting of monthly data on global stock indices the BVAR model inherently incorporates co-movements in the stock markets. The time-varying specification of the covariance structure moreover accounts for sudden shifts in the level of volatility. In an out-of-sample forecasting application we show that the BVAR model with stochastic volatility significantly outperforms the random walk both in terms of root mean squared errors as well as Bayesian log predictive scores. The BVAR model without stochastic volatility, on the other hand, underperforms relative to the random walk. In a portfolio allocation exercise we moreover show that it is possible to use the forecasts obtained from our BVAR model with common stochastic volatility to set up simple investment strategies. Our results indicate that these simple investment schemes outperform a naive buy-and-hold strategy. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series