As, in Europe, many institutional reforms have been undertaken to establish an economic union, it can be expected that the relevance of borders has decreased over time. For the EU 15, we investigate the expected integration process of the market for corporate control - an illustrative market for...

Could a researcher or policy analyst use data reported from surveys of consumer confidence to improve forecasts of consumer spending? This issue has been examined in the literature previously, which reached the conclusion that consumer confidence helped improve the forecasts slightly. But that...

In this paper we examine the sustainability of euro area public finances against the backdrop of population ageing. We critically assess the widely used projections of the Working Group on Ageing Populations (AWG) of the EU's Economic Policy Committee and argue that ageing costs may be higher...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

Banking across borders has risen substantially over the past two decades. Yet there is significant heterogeneity in the international and global activities of banks across countries. This paper develops and tests a theoretical model that explains this variation from an international trade theory...

Using data for German and Swedish multinational enterprises (MNEs), this paper assesses international employment patterns. It analyzes determinants of location choice and the degree of substitutability of labor across locations. Countries with highly skilled labor forces attract German MNEs, but...

This paper provides new evidence on the foreign direct investment stocks of German firms. We use firm-level data for the years 1990-2000 to describe the regional and sectoral patterns of German FDI through gravity-type equations. We provide evidence on the patterns of FDI by sector, by size of...

A novel linked employer-employee data set documents that expanding multinational enterprises retain more domestic jobs than competitors without foreign expansions. In contrast to prior research, a propensity score estimator allows enterprise performance to vary with foreign direct investment...

Many empirical studies in the area of foreign direct investment (FDI) exclusively focus on flows between industrialized countries. This article makes a contribution to the still relatively sparse literature on FDI in emerging markets by estimating determinants of German FDI flows to Latin...

This paper investigates how multinational firms choose the capital structure of their foreign affiliates in response to political risk. We focus on two choice variables, the leverage and the ownership structure of the foreign affiliate, and we distinguish different types of political risk, such...