The data indicate that non-wage labour costs in Germany have reached a record high in recent years. From 1972 to 2001, the ratio of non-wage labour costs to direct compensation in West German manufacturing industry rose from 55.6 per cent to 81.2 per cent. The topic of non-wage labour costs is...

Using data for German and Swedish multinational enterprises (MNEs), this paper assesses international employment patterns. It analyzes determinants of location choice and the degree of substitutability of labor across locations. Countries with highly skilled labor forces attract German MNEs, but...

Thin capitalization rules limit firms f ability to deduct internal interest payments from taxable income, thereby restricting debt shifting activities of multinational firms. Since multinational firms can limit their tax liability in several ways, regulation of debt shifting may have an impact...

Fundraising interventions may lift donations and/or shift their composition and timing, making it important to study their effect across charity space and time. We find that major fundraising appeals lift total donations, but surprisingly shift donations to other charities across time. To...

The advent of cloud computing promises to improve the way firms utilize IT solutions. Firms are expected to replace large and inflexible fixed-cost investments in IT with more targeted variable spending in cloud solutions. In addition, cloud usage is expected to increase the productivity of...

We address the role of labor cost differentials for national tax policies. Using a simple theoretical framework with two countries competing for a mobile firm, we show that in a bidding race for FDI, it is optimal for governments to compensate firms for international labor cost differentials....

In recent years wages in China have been rising and the yuan has appreciated, potentially eroding China's cost advantage in manufactures. This paper explores the evolution of China's relative unit labor costs in manufacturing over 1998-2009. Between 1998 and 2003 China's unit labor costs fell,...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

We provide novel systematic cross-country evidence that the link between domestic labour markets and CPI inflation has weakened considerably in advanced economies during recent decades. The central estimate is that the short-run pass-through from domestic labour cost changes to core CPI...