This policy note investigates whether the current level of public support to environment-friendly technologies is sufficient to allow European countries to respond to the multiple challenges posed by climate change and other environmental concerns. We first lay out the justifications for...

This article focuses on the role of labour market institutions in explaining different labour market developments in European countries, with a special attention to the new European Union member countries. This may allow us to analyse effects of various institutional setups and of their changes...

This paper analyzes the output, abatement, and investment decisions made by a monopolistic polluter under environmental liability law. The model applied considers both integrated and end-of-pipe abatement technologies. We find that in the case of fixed technology, in many instances negligence...

We analyze the relationship between legal institutions, innovation and growth. We compare a rigid (law set ex-ante) legal system and a flexible one (law set after observing current technology). The flexible system dominates in terms of welfare, amount of innovation and output growth at...

We analyze the impact of international R&D spillovers on recipient countries in terms of social and private returns. We divide the aggregate R&D stock by the business, government and education sectors and examine the impact on Total Factor Productivity. We endogenize the accrual of the R&D...

In this paper we argue that any meaningful bibliometric evaluation of researchers needs to take into account that research productivity follows distinct life cycles. Using an encompassing data set portraying the research behavior of German academic economists, we first show that research...

We study ex post outsourcing of production in an imperfectly discriminating contest, interpreted here as a research tournament or a procurement contest for being awarded some production contract. We find that the possibility of outsourcing increases competition between the contestants, leading...

Global climate change and other environmental challenges require the development of new energy technologies with lower emissions. In the near-term, R&D investments, either by government or the private sector, can bring down the costs of these lower emission technologies. However, the results of...

It is widely recognized that technological change has the potential to reduce GHG emissions without compromising economic growth; hence, any better understanding of the process of technological innovation is likely to increase our knowledge of mitigation possibilities and costs. This paper...

This paper studies the role of culture in shaping unemployment outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on local comparisons across a language barrier in Switzerland. This Röstigraben separates cultural groups, but neither labor markets nor political jurisdictions. Local contrasts across the...