This paper revisits the relationship between competition and total factor productivity by analyzing how the type and the degree of product and labor market imperfections affect different moments of total factor productivity distributions. Following the methodology developed in Dobbelaere and...

This study provides a detailed and easy-to read overview of the railway liberalisation in Belgium and the three neighbouring countries. The European Union's liberalisation Directives are often complex and are implemented in very specific ways in the different Member States. The analysis goes...

This paper examines the relationship between offshoring and the prevalence and intensity of labor market imperfections at the firm level. For this purpose, we use Belgian and Dutch manufacturing firm-level data over the period 2009-2017 from Business registers and VAT declarations combined with...

This paper aims to extract the common variation in a data set of 509 conjunctural series as an indication of the Belgian business cycle. The data set contains information on business and consumer surveys of Belgium and its neighbouring countries, macroeconomic variables and some worldwide...

This paper documents the patterns and determinants of price setting in the Belgian industry. We analyse the micro data underlying the Producer Price Index (PPI) over the period from February 2001 to January 2005. On average only one out of four prices changes in a typical month, whereas the...

How should we value and manage deposit accounts where deposits have a zero contractual maturity, but which, in practice, remain stable through time and are remunerated below market rates? Does the economic value of the deposit account differ from the face value and can we reliably measure it? To...

We test whether firms with a single bank are better shielded from loss of credit and investment cuts in periods of adverse cash flow shocks than firms with multiple bank relationships. Our estimates of the cash flow sensitivity of investment show that both types of firms are equally subject to...

Whilst overall productivity growth is stalling, firms at the frontier are still able to capture the benefits of the newest technologies and business practices. This paper uses linked employer-employee data covering all Belgian firms over a period of almost 20 years and investigates the...

In 2020, Belgian ports generated € 31.8 billion in direct and indirect value added (7% of Belgian GDP) and employed 254 611 full-time equivalents (FTEs) either directly or indirectly (5.9% of Belgian domestic employment including the self-employed). Despite the COVID-19 outbreak, direct...

The main purpose of this Working Paper is providing an overview of the economic importance of the Flemish maritime ports, the Liège port complex and the port of Brussels over the period 2014-2019 in terms of value added, employment and investment based on annual account figures. In 2019,...