Attempts to curb illegal activity through regulation gets complicated when agents can adapt to circumvent enforcement. Economic theory suggests that conducting audits on a predictable schedule, and (counter-intuitively) at high frequency, can undermine the effectiveness of audits. We conduct a...

We uncover a hidden illegal fishing practice: the use of fishing nets with illegally small mesh size. The small mesh prevents nearly all fish of saleable size from escaping the net, but also traps a large number of fish which are too small to be sold on the market and are therefore discarded at...

Using microdata, we analyse the determinants of firm relocation and outsourcing decisions and their effects on firms' employment decisions. The results for a sample of 32 countries show that both strategies have been more intense in the EU-15 countries than in the rest and that, in some cases,...

This paper presents an empirical assessment of the endogenous optimum currency area theory. Frankel and Rose (1998) study the endogeneity of a currency union through the lens of international trade flows. Our study extends Frankel and Rose's model by using FDI flows to test the original theory...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

We estimate how trade openness affects the relationship between wages, labour productivity and foreign wages using sector-level time series for several EU member states. In some countries wages became less responsive to foreign wages as trade costs declined. We show this counter-intuitive result...

We estimate the effect of divorce legalization on the long-term well-being of children. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting the different timing of divorce legalization across European countries. Using European Community Household Panel data, we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts...

We investigate the direct and long-run effects of fertility on employment in Europe estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and modeling assumptions related to initial conditions, unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation...

OECD countries faced largely divergent employment rates during the last decades. But the whole bulk of the cross-national and cross-temporal heterogeneity relies on specific demographic groups: prime-age women and younger and older individuals. This paper argues that family labor supply...

European Union economies are pressed by (i) a demographic change that induces population ageing and a decline of the workforce, and (ii) a split labour market that is characterized by high levels of unemployment for low-skilled people and a simultaneous shortage of skilled workers. This lack of...