We show that every time a local economy generates a new job by attracting a new business in the traded sector, a significant number of additional jobs are created in the non-traded sector. This multiplier effect is particularly large for jobs with high levels of human capital and for high tech...

This paper shows that in the Baltic countries, commuting reduces urban- rural wage and employment disparities and increases national output. To quantify the effect of commuting on wage differentials, two sets of earnings functions are estimated (based on Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian Labor...

Do employers and workers underbid prevailing wages if there is unemployment? Do employers take advantage of workers’ underbidding by lowering wages? We hypothesize that under conditions of incomplete labor contracts wage levels may positively affect workers’ propensity to cooperate. This, in...

This paper investigates the relationship between bilateral FDI positions and cross-country business cycle correlations in the period 1982–2001. We find that countries that have comparatively intensive FDI relations also have more synchronized business cycles during 1995–2001. Before 1995, we...

Foreign-owned firms account for a significant part of output in many industrialized countries. However, compared to international trade linkages, relatively little is known about the role of foreign direct investment linkages and multinational firm behavior in the transmission of disturbances...

This paper considers the effects of union-bargained minimum wages on transitions into and out of employment in the hotels and catering industry over the period 1979–99. This industry is characterised by a high fraction of unskilled labour input, high worker turnover and binding minimum wages....

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...