Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities:[...]

An important discussion in recent years is the introduction of product patentsand the abolition of process patents. In a model with endogenous number of innovatingfirms, we show that whether product patent increases R&D is ambiguous, and depends onthe type of market demand and the cost of R&D....

In this paper we show that vocational training is an important determinant of productivitygrowth. We construct a multi-country, multi-sectoral dataset, and quantify empirically to whatextent vocational training has contributed to increase the growth rate of labor productivity inEurope between...

I provide empirical evidence that badly governed firms respond more to aggregate shocks than do well governed firms.(...)

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wagesspecified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wagegap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

Recent research has led to the empirical regularity that rm growth rate distributionsare heavy tailed. This nding implies that a few rms experience spectaculargrowth rates and decline, but that most rms have marginal growth rates. The literatureon high growth rms shows that high growth rms are...

The literature shows that for most UK industries privatization might be necessary but is not sufficient to produce economic benefits. Often prior changes in management or later changes in market structure and regulation have larger impacts than privatization itself. We ask what changes around...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality andunemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to thesame externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal andinformal firms have monopoly...

The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...