In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

European labor markets are characterized by the low geographical mobility of workers. The absence of mobility is a factor behind high unemployment when jobless people prefer to remain in their home region rather than to go prospecting in more dynamic areas. In this paper, we attempt to...

Why did employment growth – high in the last decade – take place at the expense of young workers in the countries of Central and Southern Europe? This is the question addressed in this paper. Youth unemployment has approached or exceeded 20% despite a variety of factors, common to most EU...

This paper investigates the interplay between social capital, innovation and per capita income growth in the European Union. We model and identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into higher income levels. In an empirical investigation of 102 European regions...

Pacts for employment and competitiveness are an integral component of the ongoing process of decentralization of collective bargaining in Germany, a phenomenon that has been hailed as key to that nation's economic resurgence. Yet little is known about the effects of pacts on firm performance....

This paper combines, explains and summarizes recent findings from the empirical literature focusing on the FDI's effect on firms' performances by collecting all the relevant firm level quantitative studies to run a regression of regressions focused on Enlarged Europe. The results show that there...

We study the impact of the Brexit referendum on Irish exporters to the UK. The referendum triggered a sharp devaluation of the British pound vis-a-vis the euro and led to considerable uncertainty about future trade relations between the UK and the EU. Using administrative data on the universe of...

Using a cross section of matched data from the employee and management questionnaires of the European Company Survey, this paper investigates the determinants of worker commitment and the potential contribution of commitment to establishment performance. An index of worker commitment is...

This paper analyses the impact of European Union (EU) funds on the performance of private firms. In particular, we examine a quasi-natural experiment consisting of a redrawing of administrative areas that expanded regional eligibility and led to a sudden increase in accessibility to EU grants...