Donato Di Carlo

Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies | MPIFG

Political economy scholarship generally assumes that governments are interested in enforcing economic regulations. Cases of non-enforcement are predominantly studied in the context of developing countries and are chiefly associated with states' deficient institutional capacity. This article casts doubts on these assumptions by showing how governmen...

German public sector wage restraint has been explained through the presence of a specific type of inter‐sectoral wage coordination in the industrial relations system—that is, export sector‐led pattern bargaining. First, as a literature‐assessing exercise, this paper reviews the literature in industrial relations and comparative political economy (C...

This chapter explores the transformation of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) from a small Directorate-General within the Treasury to a full-fledged National Development Bank charged with channelling credit toward small firms and Mid-Caps, financing infrastructural projects, providing patient liquidity to the treasury and equity investment to strateg...

Die angebotsseitigen Preisschübe seit Mitte des Jahres 2021 haben Sorgen vor der Entstehung einer Lohn-Preis-Spirale geweckt und neue Runden korporatis-tischer Konzertierung auf den Plan gerufen. Wir argumentieren auf Grundlage einer sektoralen und ländervergleichend angelegten Betrachtung der produkti-vitätsbereinigten Arbeitskostenauftriebe zwisc...

Within Europe’s regulatory state, industrial policy has largely remained within national governments’ remit. Yet, a plethora of new supra- and cross-national industrial policy initiatives have recently emerged whereby the Commission proactively engages in pan-European activities to foster innovation and economic development. This article brings the...

Despite being one of the world's major internationally traded services, tourism remains neglected within debates on European integration and growth models. We highlight the rise of tourism-led growth in Southern Europe. We argue that the process of European integration has been a double-edged sword, simultaneously incentivizing and forcing Southern...

Despite being one of the world's major internationally traded services, tourism remains neglected within debates on European integration and growth models. We highlight the rise of tourism-led growth in Southern Europe. We argue that the process of European integration has been a double-edged sword, simultaneously incentivizing and forcing Southern...

Public investment spending declined steadily in advanced economies during the last three decades. Germany is a case in point where the aggregate decline coincided with growing inequality in investments across districts. What explains the variation in local investment spending? We assembled a novel data set to investigate the effects of structural c...

The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformati...

How do European institutions affect the tension between economic globalization and social protection? While scholars have focused on the legal and economic logics of European integration embodied by the European Court of Justice and the Commission, much less is known about the monetary logic of integration embodied by the European Central Bank (ECB...

Crosscountry variation in the outcomes of public sector wage-setting (PSWS) persists in Europe. Received wisdom from the neo-corporatist scholarship attributes it to the presence/absence of centralized or coordinated wage-setting regimes. This article challenges the conventional view by analysing PSWS through the lens of the common-pool problem of...

Public investment spending declined steadily in advanced economies during the last three decades. Germany is a case in point where the aggregate decline coincided with growing inequality in investments across districts. What explains variation in local investment spending? We assembled a novel dataset to investigate the effects of structural constr...

Systematic variation in the outcomes of public sector wage-setting (PSWS) persists in Europe. PSWS is generally analyzed as a problem of inter-sectoral wage co-ordination in political economy literature. To do justice to PSWS’ unique features, this article advances a state-centered theoretical framework which treats PSWS by political employers as f...

The impact of international economic integration on social protection is conditional on the monetary regime. This key insight of both Polanyi and Ruggie has been neglected in the Polanyi-inspired debate on the social consequences of European integration. Focusing on the European Court of Justice and the European Commission as the supranational enfo...

National development banks (NDBs) have transformed from outdated relics of national industrial policy to central pillars of the European Union’s economic project. This trend, which accelerated after the Financial Crisis of 2007, has led to a proliferation of NDBs with an expanded size and scope. However, it is surprising that the EU—which has champ...

Low German wages are often cited as a key contributing factor to imbalances in the Eurozone. Donato Di Carlo and Martin Höpner demonstrate that while nominal unit labour cost growth in Germany consistently undershot that of other Eurozone countries in the first decade of the euro, the country has undergone a ‘silent rebalancing’ following the finan...

German public sector wage restraint has been explained through the presence of a specific type of inter-sectoral wage coordination in the industrial relations system – i.e., export sector-led pattern bargaining. This paper has a twofold ambition. First, as a literature-assessing exercise, I review the literature in industrial relations and comparat...

In Germany, restraint in public sector wage setting ever since the start of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has been explained through the presence of a specific type of inter-sectoral wage coordination in the industrial relations system, i.e. export-sector-led pattern bargaining. Pattern bargaining is understood in the literature as...