The government’s main objective in developing better regulation and policy is to reduce the regulatory burden on small businesses, particularly those which act as a barrier to start-up and growth, and improve the ability of small businesses to sell to the public sector.The purpose of this...

How can high rates of attrition persist in a specific IT-hub for years, and how do transnationallyoperating companies with different institutional backgrounds cope with this challengeorganisationally? The present paper addresses this question by presenting first results of acurrent SOFI-project...

The paper is the first analysis of the competitiveness of Russian enterprises from the perspective of value chains, with a focus on the example of tube & pipe and furniture producers. In both industries, Russian firms enjoy an advantage on the raw material side. Nevertheless, the overall...

Nobuko Inagawa has written an excellent paper on the relevance of Japanese experiences for a successful integration of Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) into the world economy. Talking about the case of Japan is particularly interesting - and potentially controversial - compared...

For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, Washington's preeminent think tank, have tracked the march of economic freedom around the world with the influential Index of Economic Freedom. Since 1995, the Index has brought Smith's theories about liberty, prosperity and...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar’s long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. Idescribe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, withdistinguished economists’ stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar’s goal is to show howeconomists work, but also...

The robust empirical finding that exporting firms are systematically different from firms thatmerely serve domestic consumers has inspired the development of a new brand of tradetheory, the theory of heterogeneous firms and trade. The establishment of a canonical modeldue to Melitz (2003) has...

Vor etwas mehr als einem Jahr hat dasIAB seine „Wege aus der Arbeitsmarktkrise“veröffentlicht. Dabei warenHandlungsoptionen aus vier Politikbereichenauf den Prüfstand gestelltund ein gut durchdachter Policy-Mixaus Finanz-, Ordnungs-, Tarif- undArbeitsmarktpolitik zur Lösung...

[...]We begin by discussing the so-called first generation ofmodels, in which crises are viewed in the literature as theunavoidable result of unsustainable policies or fundamentalimbalances. Next, we survey the literature on the secondgeneration of models, which highlights the possibility of...