We analyze the two goals behind the European Bologna Process of increasing student mobility: enabling graduates to develop multi-cultural skills and increasing the quality of universities. We isolate three effects: 1) a competition effect that raises quality; 2) a free rider effect that lowers...

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, postconstitutionalregulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization – using a singledataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country anda variety of...

We analyze the rise and decline of the steel and mining industries in the regionsof Saarland, Lorraine und Luxemburg over a long period, from the mid-19th century to 2003.Our main focus in on the period of structural decline in these industries after the secondworld war. Dierences in the...

Tax competition within the EU is fiercer than in the rest of the OECD with tax rates fallingrapidly. This paper analyzes tax responses of EU-15 countries to corporate tax changes in theEU-10 new member states as a function of their proximity to these new member states. Theaverage corporate tax...

The main argument in this paper is that new information and communication technologies (ICT) in the financial industry will increase specialisation and competition within the European financial centre system and thereby lead to a ‘re-bundling’ of functions of the various financial centres....

In den 1980er und den frühen 1990er Jahren waren japanische Banken die weltweit größten Finanzinstitute und galten als Inbegriff „globaler“ Banken. Der Crash der japanischenWertpapier- und Immobilienmärkte Anfang der 1990er Jahre und die nachfolgende Rezessionwaren Anlass zu tiefgreifenden...

This paper sheds new light on the role of regional labor market conditions for regional mobility. We study competition for vacant jobs along two dimensions - between employed and unemployed job searchers, and between resident and non-resident job searchers - within a simple matching framework....

Recent studies suggest that the correlation of stock returnsincreases with decreasing geographical distance. However, there is some debateon the appropriate methodology for measuring the effects of distanceon correlation. We modify a regression approach suggested in the literatureand complement...

This paper pursues three aims. First, we provide a review of current theoretical advanceswhich pertain to the relationship between trade, FDI and labor markets. We do so under thefollowing (not mutually exclusive) headings: (1) slicing-up the value added chain and the turnto a task-based...

We analyze empirically the effects of urban agglomeration on Italian college graduates’ workpossibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that each 100,000inhabitant-increase in the size of the individual’s province of work reduces the chances ofbeing an entrepreneur...