This study analyzes the use of design and the position of the design function in Finnish manufacturing firms. We also study the impact of design on companies business performance. The paper is based on a survey directed to the member companies of the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) in...

The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in research on various labor market institutions. This paper offers a brief overview and discussion of research on the labor market impacts of minimum wages (MW), unemployment insurance (UI), and employment protection legislation (EPL). It is...

The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in research on various labor market institutions. This paper offers a brief overview and discussion of research on the labor market impacts of minimum wages (MW), unemployment insurance (UI), and employment protection legislation (EPL). It is...

This study analyses the dynamics of productivity growth at the micro level in Finnish manufacturing industries. It is shown that productivity-enhancing restructuring (so-called “creative destruction”) has played a crucial role especially since the mid-1980s. Empirical evidence is provided...

In this paper we analyze the evolution of firm financial efficiency in the Czech Republic. Using a large panel of more than 400,000 Czech firm/years we study whether firms fully utilize their resources, how firm financial efficiency evolves over time, and how firm financial efficiency is...

This study analyzes trends in specialization of the Finnish industry since the 1980s. Low technology industries, such as pulp and paper, have had traditionally a large proportion of the Finnish industrial output. During the recent decades their share of output has decreased significantly and...

The report analyses the impacts of globalization on competitiveness of national economies, industries and firms. The focus is in mechanical and electrical engineering and machinery. Global division of labor has significantly changed over the past few decades when the large emerging economies...

This paper estimates technology growth using several variants of the Hall (1988, 1990) method on data for Swedish two-digit manufacturing industries. More specifically, I first apply and evaluate two different approaches to control for varying factor utilization developed by Basu et al. (1998)...

In this paper we study the capital adjustment process in Swedish manufacturing firms and relate the empirical findings to standard models of firm behavior in the presence of impediments to capital adjustments. We find that (i) a model with irreversible capital goes a very long way in capturing...

This paper aims to establish how the innovative activity in Finland has changed over time in the transition from a resource-driven economy to a knowledge-driven economy. The paper first takes a historical perspective on innovation and industrial activity in Finland through a descriptive...