Using data from the Community Innovation Survey for Belgium in two consecutive periods, this paper explores the relationship between firm-level innovation activities and the propensity to start exporting. To measure innovation, we include indicators of both innovative effort (R&D activities) as...

The objective of this paper is to identify the determinants of the decision to innovate in Taiwan. Three “innovation strategies” are considered : doing R&D only, importing technology only, and combining both. We estimate a Bivariate Probit on a panel of more than 27000 Taiwanese...

In this paper we consider a simple model of horizontal differentiation and derive the closed form solutions for the level of the variables in the decentralized economy and in the social planner case. This enables us to analyze consumers’ welfare as a function of the parameter representing...

This paper simulates the impact of a permanent fertility shock on economic growth, using endogenous versus exogenous growth OLG models. An endogenous growth model, with education as the engine of growth, dampens the negative impact of a decline in fertility on growth when compared with an...

In this paper we study the economic determinants of the inter-sectoral distribution of skilled workers and the long-run consequences of imperfect competition on growth within an R&D-based growth model with human capital accumulation. We find that steady-state growth is driven only by incentives...

Innovative workplace practices based on multi-tasking and ICT that have been diffusing in most OECD countries since the 1990s have strong consequences on working conditions. Available data show together with the emergence of new organizational forms like multi-tasking, the increase in the...

This paper provides theoretical foundations to the contemporaneous increase in computer usage, human capital and multi-tasking observed in many OECD countries during the 1990s. The links between work organization, technology and human capital is modelled by establishing the conditions under...

In this paper, we study how, depending on the sociological and technological characteristics of the economy, a "unified" or, on the contrary, a stratified way of communicating may émerge. Communication takes place less efficiently in the stratified case, because people who spend différent...

This paper presents and assesses the recent application of models in the Real Business Cycle (RBC) tradition to the analysis of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The main conclusion is that the breaking of the depression taboo has been a desirable completion of the cliometric revolution: no...

Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory ? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They admitted that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to the...