We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components – real wages, capital intensity, and technology – are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In...

The international economic debate on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has focused mainly on trade induced real income gains while the FDI related and innovation induced benefits have been largely neglected, although the EU and the US are leading FDI host countries and...

We examine the trajectories of the real unit labour costs (RULCs) in a selection of Eurozone economies. Strong asymmetries in the convergence process of the RULCs and its components - real wages, capital intensity, and technology - are uncovered through decomposition and cluster analyses. In the...

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and...

The fraction of R&D active firms decreased in Switzerland but increased in the Netherlands from 2000-2016. This paper examines reasons for this divergence and its impact on productivity growth. Our micro-data reveal R&D concentration among high-productivity firms in Switzerland. Innovation...

In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an ‘empirical law of economics’ – the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries. Our paper...

In 2007 the Italian central government started a program by transferring funds to regional governments to develop both private and public early childcare services. Exploiting the different timing of program implementation across regions, we evaluate its effectiveness in boosting the public...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the impact of migration on economic growth for 22 OECD countries between 1986-2006 and relies on a unique data set we compiled that allows us to distinguish net migration of the native-born and foreign-born by skill level. Specifically, after introducing...

We present in this paper the panel econometrics estimation approach of measuring the technical change and total factor productivity (TFP) growth of 30 Chinese provinces during the period of 1993 to 2003. The random effects model with heteroscedastic variances has been used for the estimation of...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...