Recent research in international economics highlights the role of interdependencies of investment decisions and sales of multinational firms. Previous work focused on and provided evidence for aggregate flows or stocks of foreign direct investment, showing that interdependence declines in...

Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

Fertility has long been declining in industrialised countries and the existence of public pension systems is considered as one of the causes. This paper is the first to provide detailed evidence based on historical data on the mechanism by which a public pension system depresses fertility. Our...

This paper aims at better understanding the inefficiency due to distributional conflicts, which are inherent in every market economy. To this end, we set up a simple general equilibrium model with the following characteristics: two groups of agents (capitalists and workers), an endogenous income...

In recent years, sustainability has represented one of the most important policy goals explored in the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature. But related hypotheses, performance measures and results continue to present a challenge. The present paper contributes to this ongoing literature...

Using annual data for the period 1992-2012, this paper examines trade flows between China and its main trade partners in Asia, North America and Europe, and whether increasing trade has led to industrial structural adjustment and changes in China’s trade patterns. The analysis is based on both...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

The issue of the nature of the altruism inherent in blood donation and the perverse effects of financial rewards for blood and/or organ donation has been recently revisited in the economic literature with limited consensus. As Titmuss (1970) famously pointed out, providing monetary incentives to...

We apply German Mikrozensus data for the period 1996 to 2004 to investigate the employment status of mothers. Specifically, we ask whether there are behavioral differences between mothers in East and West Germany, whether these differences disappear over time, and whether there are differences...