This paper explores the implications of Unified Growth Theory for the origins of existing differences in income per capita across countries. The theory sheds light on three fundamental layers of comparative development. It identifies the factors that have governed the pace of the transition from...

What is the impact of import competition from other low-wage countries (LWCs) on inflationary pressure in Western Europe? This paper seeks to understand whether labor-intensive exports from emerging Europe, Asia, and other global regions have a uniform impact on producer prices in Germany,...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

Using matched employer-employee data from eleven African countries, we investigate if there is job sorting in African labor markets. We find that much of the wage gap correlated with education is driven by selection across occupations and firms. This is consistent with educated workers being...

This study investigates the impact of international competitiveness on net employment, job creation, job destruction, and gross job flows for a representative sample of German establishments from 1993 to 2005. We find a statistically significant but economically small effect of real exchange...

Using an RAS update to 1990 of an 86-sector input-output table for Hungary in 1986, and corresponding data on world-to-domestic price ratios for 1990, this paper calculates domestic resource costs (DRCs) for Hungarian industries. The disaggregated results are compared with corresponding...