This paper revisits the "footloose" nature of multinational firms (MNFs) hypothesis. Using firm-level data for Belgium over the period 1997-2008, we rely on a Probit model and take into account the endogeneity of the determinants of firm exit. Our results may be summarised as follows. First, the...

Using firm-level data for Belgium over the period 1997-2005, we evaluate the elasticity of firms' labor and real average labor compensation to microeconomic total factor productivity (TFP). Our results may be summarized as follows. First, we find that the elasticity of average labor compensation...

This paper examines whether differences in wage rigidity across sectors can be explained by differences in workforce composition, competition, technology and wage bargaining institutions. We adopt the measure of downward real wage rigidity (DRWR) developed by Dickens and Goette (2006) and rely...

Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

This paper decomposes wage bill changes at the firm level into components due to wage changes, and components due to net flows of employment. The analysis relies on an administrative employer-employee dataset of individual annual earnings matched with firms' annual accounts for Belgium over the...

This paper evaluates the extent of downward nominal and real wage rigidity for different categories of workers and firms using the methodology recently developed by the International Wage Flexibility Project (Dickens and Goette, 2006). The analysis is based on an administrative data set on...

This paper presents a simple model of state-dependent pricing that allows identification of the relative importance of the degree of price rigidity that is inherent to the price setting mechanism (intrinsic) and that which is due to the price's driving variables (extrinsic). Using two data sets...

We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms' investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms' subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and price...

In this paper we investigate how demand and output price uncertainty affect investment plans of Belgian manufacturing firms. We obtain time-varying uncertainty measures at the firm and industry level from the Belgian monthly business cycle survey and investment plans from the half-yearly...