Recent studies of outlaw communities provide qualitative evidence of their existence and the organisation of the underlying innovation processes. We provide descriptive results from a large scale survey of two online outlaw communities focussing on Microsoft's XBox. In line with previous...

The existing literature identifies patent thickets indirectly. In this paper we propose a novel measure based on patent citations which allows us to measure the density of patent thickets directly. We discuss the algorithm which generates the measure and present descriptive results validating...

A PAYGO system may serve as insurance against not having children and as an enforcement device for ungrateful children who are unwilling to pay their parents a pension. In fact, the latter was Bismarck’s historic motive for introducing this system. It is true that the PAYGO system reduces the...

Due to exceptionally low birth rates, the dynamism of Europe will be lagging behind that of other regions of the world for the time being. The paper assembles a rich body of comparative empirical data to clarify the extent of the demographic problems for the EU countries. It advances the view...

The forces of the market and systems competition bring about economic and social convergence in Europe, and there is no need for social policies at the EU level. Social harmonization would distort migration flows and slow down the speed of economic convergence. National welfare states will be...

Globalisation means gains from trade, but not for everyone. As gains from trade come along with factor price convergence, substantial fractions of the working classes in the high-wage countries of the West are likely to belong to the group of losers. In this situation it is tempting for the...

This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the wages and social benefits of its unskilled workers against wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social standards harms the workers and that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment....

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tarif cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tarif reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of oshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses territorial...