The debate on the risks and benefits of the globalisation of international capital markets has focused on the volume and the volatility of the main capital flows - foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio investment, and foreign bank lending. Financial transfers in the form of worker...

Recent studies have shown that there are significant earnings differentials between immigrants and natives in Switzerland. The goal of this paper is to determine whether these differences can be attributed to diverging socio-economic endowments or to discrimination. We use the well-known...

In the context of energy security and climate protection, biomass is given high importance. Nevertheless, land-use conflicts resulting from the cultivation of biomass and their economy-wide effects are yet to be fully understood. To shed light on this issue we link three distinctive models; a...

The standard indicators used to compare cross-country innovation are in the Global Competitiveness Report (GCR). But there are problems with aggregation and response bias with these largely self-reported measures (Hollanders and van Cruysen, 2008). We propose a theory-based metric using Data...

This article focuses on an apparent conflict between the standard trade theory and available empirical evidence on factor flows. Theoretically, labor and capital flows must be substitutes. However, empirical papers find migration and FDI to be either substitutes or complements, depending upon...

This paper is concerned with the study of the labor market performance of immigrants. The unemployment rate is used as an indicator and natives as the reference group for the analysis. The analysis proceeds in two steps. In a first step, probit regressions on the unemployment probabilities are...

Information costs and regulatory barriers are the main distinguishing features of international financial markets as compared to national financial markets. This paper presents a simple model of the impact of these factors on banks' cross-border activities and provides empirical evidence. Our...

If the technological revolution which has taken place over the past decades has lowered information costs and if information costs increase in distance, distance should - ceteris paribus - become less important in determining international bank lending. We are using a dataset on assets and...

In recent publications it has been argued that the change of the skill structure of industrial employment is caused by biased technical progress rather than by increasing international trade with low wage countries. However, in linking prices for final goods with prices of primary factors, most...

This paper elaborates on the relative importance of sectoral shocks for real economic activity in Germany. Implications of multisectoral real business cycle models are examined by resorting to testing techniques based on stock market returns. The empirical evidence is obtained by calculating...