Ricardian trade theory was based on the cost of labor at a time when grain and other consumer goods accounted for most subsistence spending. But today's budgets are dominated by payments to the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector and to newly privatized monopolies. This has made...

Much of the theoretical and empirical research regarding the impact of policy shifts on the economies of developing countries has tended to focus on macro-level aggregates, without adequate attention to sectoral-level dynamics. In the literature where such dynamics are emphasized, the focus has...

As per the balance of payments constraint hypothesis, in an open economy, achieving a high long-run rate of growth would require a country to reduce its balance of payments constraint through an improved export performance, and the production of import substitutes, which would lower the income...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the importance of labor market conditions and in particular of employment protection legislation as a determinant of bilateral Foreign Direct Investment flows to seven Central and Eastern European countries. Although our results indicate...

This paper analyzes the economic impact of unions on productivity in the manufacturing sector across six Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Using an augmented Cobb-Douglas production function, the paper finds that unions have positive, but mostly...

The paper examines the interdependencies of financialisation and working conditions by exploring the comparative findings of a micro-level survey on household income, household debt, and working conditions which was conducted in five European countries representing different institutional and...

Labour market developments have Germany undergone two shocks: German reunification in the early 1990s, and the Hartz reforms in the early 2000s. They separated the German labour market into the traditional rather corporatist labour market segment, characterised by a high degree of coordination,...

This paper investigates temporary jobs and on-the-job training in the Swedish labour market during the 1990s. The analysis focuses on how the incidence and the amount of OJT differ between workers who hold temporary jobs vis-à-vis workers who hold open-ended jobs. An important aspect is also...

In this paper we investigate the role of reciprocity in sustaining the emergence of implicit collusive agreements in hierarchical organizations. We conduct a laboratory experiment in which an agent hires, on behalf of the principal, one worker out of two candidates. The two candidates differ in...

The stylized facts of neoliberalism include a decline in steady state rate of growth and labor share. Recent classical-Keynesian literature sees the latter as a cause for the former. A crucial element is the distinction between short and long run. The business cycle is profit-led and...