According to the pollution haven hypotheses differences in environmental regulation affect trade flows and plant location. Specifically, environmental stringency should decrease exports and increase imports of "dirty" goods. This paper estimates a gravity model to establish whether the...

We analyze the relationship between institutional quality and firm efficiency. Using rich data on firms in the European Union between 2005 and 2012, we show that high institutional quality lowers the share of persistently inefficiently used assets. The adverse effect of low institutional quality...

Pacts for employment and competitiveness are an integral component of the ongoing process of decentralization of collective bargaining in Germany, a phenomenon that has been hailed as key to that nation's economic resurgence. Yet little is known about the effects of pacts on firm performance....

This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being - solidarity (S) and agency (A) - to be...

A shortfall in employee voice attendant upon union decline has long been forewarned. Data from the third European Company Survey is used to establish perceived shortfalls in employee involvement based on the responses of employee representatives in establishments where formal workplace employee...

This paper provides robust estimates of the impact of both product and labour market regulations on unemployment using data for 24 European countries over the period 1998-2013. Controlling for country-fixed effects, endogeneity and a large set of covariates, results show that product market...

Using cross-country data from the European Company Survey, we investigate the relationship between workplace employee representation and five behavioral outcomes: strike incidence, the climate of industrial relations, sickness/absenteeism, employee motivation, and staff retention. The evidence...