The paper investigates the consequences of outsourcing of labor intensive activities to lowwage economies. This trend challenges the two basic functions of the welfare state, redistribution and social insurance when private unemployment insurance markets are missing. The main results are: (i)...

This paper proposes a proximity-concentration tradeoff in product space as a determinant of horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI). Firms that enter a foreign market by exporting are able to capture consumer surplus from introducing a differentiated product with characteristics that the...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) on fertility decisions of Italian working women using administrative data. We exploit a reform that introduced in 1990 costs for dismissals unmotivated by a ‘fair cause’ or ‘justified motive’ in...

This paper is based on the model of backward linkages from foreign direct investment (FDI) Lin/Saggi (2003), where the market structure of the final goods sector is represented by a monopoly or Cournot oligopoly, and the supplier sector - by a pure monopoly. We extend this model by examining...

This paper offers quasi experimental evidence of the existence of spillover effects of UI extensions using a unique program that extended unemployment benefits drastically for a subset of workers in selected regions of Austria. We use non-eligible unemployed in treated regions, and a...

We reassess the driving forces behind the recent decline of corporate tax rates in Europe. Using data for up to 32 countries from 1983 to 2006, we analyze the role of economic and financial openness as well as tax competition while allowing for dynamic adjustment to shocks and period-specific as...

This paper analyses the development of the ratio of corporate taxes to wage taxes using a simple political economy model with internationally mobile and immobile firms. Among other results, our model predicts that countries reduce their corporate tax rate, relative to the wage tax, either when...

This paper uses high-frequency data for publicly-listed Japanese manufacturing firms over the period 2000 to 2010 to show that a greater reliance on foreign market sales increases the conditional volatility of firms' stock returns. The two margins of global engagement we consider, namely,...

Liste di mobilitý (LM) is an Italian labour market programme targeted to dismissed workers. There is a 'passive' component granting monetary benefits to employees dismissed by firms larger than 15 employees, and an 'active' component providing an employment subsidy to any firm hiring workers...