This paper takes advantage of access to detailed matched bank-firm data to investigate whether and how employment decisions of SMEs have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks' financial health following the 2008 crisis is used as an...

A growing literature uses changes in residual volatility for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. A number of different models for heteroskedasticity or conditional heteroskedasticity are proposed and used in applications in this context. This study reviews the...

Changes in residual volatility in vector autoregressive (VAR) models can be used for identifying structural shocks in a structural VAR analysis. Testable conditions are given for full identification for the case where the volatility changes can be modelled by a multivariate GARCH process. Formal...

In the last decades, international trade has increased between industrialised countries and between high- and low-wage countries. This important change has raised questions on how international trade affects the labour market. In this spirit, this paper aims to investigate the impact of...

Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into "good" and "bad" jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that...

Labour economists typically assume that pay differences between occupations can be explained with variations in productivity. The empirical evidence on the validity of this assumption is surprisingly thin and subject to various potential biases. The authors use matched employer-employee panel...

Offshoring is generally believed to be productivity-enhancing and this belief is underpinned by economic theory. This article contributes to the growing literature that tests empirically whether offshoring does indeed help to improve productivity. Estimating the impact of materials and business...

The paper explores the link between different institutional features of minimum wage systems and the minimum wage bite. We notably address the striking absence of studies on sectoral-level minima and exploit unique data covering 17 European countries and information from more than 1100...

We estimate the impact of workforce diversity on productivity, wages and productivity-wage gaps (i.e. profits) using detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data. Findings, robust to a large set of covariates, specifications and econometric issues, show that educational (age) diversity...

We provide first evidence regarding the direct impact of educational mismatch on firm productivity. To do so, we rely on representative linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium covering the period 1999-2006. Controlling for simultaneity issues, time-invariant unobserved workplace...