This paper studies the variable impact of the global economic crisis on the post-communist countries of South East Europe and Turkey. The central question is whether the institutional reforms introduced in the former group of countries during the transition period have improved their ability to...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

Higher ability workers benefit more from bigger cities while housing costs there are higher for everyone, and yet there is little sorting on ability. A possible explanation is that young individuals have an imperfect assessment of their ability, and, when they learn about it, early decisions...

Thomas Friedman (2005, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) argues that the expansion of trade, the internationalization of firms, the galloping process of outsourcing and the possibility of networking are creating a ‘flat...

This article addresses the issue of termination of employment because of the conduct of the employee in her leisure time, in the light of the human right to private life. It explores the impact on the retention of employment of activities taking place outside the workplace and outside working...

Union membership rose by 100,000 in 1999 ending two decades of sustained membership losses û the longest, deepest decline in British labour history yielding a cumulative fall of over 5 million members. This paper analyses that haemorrhage in membership and asks whether or not the recent...

Detailed education, employment and training histories have been constructed for a cohort of 440 male respondents from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The data show that most respondents without college degrees have experienced at least one occupational break, defined as a change from...

In recent years, the third or voluntary sector has become more important for ‘Europe’, as indicated by the 1997 Communication of the European Commission and various Declarations attached to the EU Treaties. These official statements not only suggest greater political interest in the third...

This paper uses new product-specific, micro-level US data to show that New England had lower levels of productivity in cotton spinning than Lancashire, c. 1900, contradicting results derived by Broadberry from the Censuses of Production. The discrepancy stems from the Censuses’ poor methods of...