In recent years, Europe has witnessed an accelerated process of economic integration. Trade barriers were removed, the euro was introduced and ten new member states have joined the European Union. This paper analyzes how this process of increased economic integration has affected labor and...

In this paper we argue that export data are an inadequate tool to measure a country's international competitiveness when external trade is dominated by export-processing trade. Export data do not necessarily reflect the value produced in an exporting country, but rather capture the gross value...

This paper provides new evidence on the link between finance and firm-level productivity focusing on the case of Estonia. We contribute to the literature in two important respects: (1) we look explicitly at the role of financial constraints; and (2) we develop a methodology that corrects for the...

Using firm-level data for Estonia for the years 1997-2005, we analyze the impact of international competition on firm dynamics, considering both firm closedown and product switching. This paper contributes to the literature in two important ways: (1) this is the first paper to study the...

Multinational companies and national governments pay considerable attention to labor cost and labor productivity differentials across countries. This paper analyzes total and unit labor differentials for a group of European and non-European countries in the 1960-1998 period. It deals with (i)...

This paper uses firm level panel data of firm provided training to estimate its impact on productivity and wages. To this end the strategy proposed by Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2006) for estimating production functions to control for the endogeneity of input factors and training is applied....

In this paper we investigate to what extent firm investment in transition countries is sensitive to internal finance. We use accounts data of over 4000 companies in four countries at different stages of transition. We find that firms in Bulgaria and Romania are less sensitive to internal...

In most transition countries the aggregate level evidence suggests that most industries are just destroying jobs, due to the legacy of communism where ovfirmanning levels of employment were the nfirm. This paper sheds light on whether the transition process in Slovenian manufacturing has been...

Past evidence on the incidence of payroll tax subsidies on employment and wages for disadvantaged workers has been quite mixed. Therefore, this paper makes use of a unique panel of firm level data and a natural experiment to analyze the incidence of wage subsidies on full-time manual workers and...

This paper investigates the detfirminants of firm survival and growth in Slovenia, a country in transition from a plan to a market economy. firm growth (measured using employment) and firm survival (the probability of remaining in activity) are estimated using firm level data for the years 1994...