This paper analyses the relationship between openness to trade and wages at the industry level (15 manufacturing industries) in 25 EU countries over the period from 1995 to 2005. By applying a cross-country and industry-specific approach, it is possible to control for unobserved heterogeneity at...

In the last decades, international trade has increased between industrialised countries and between high- and low-wage countries. This important change has raised questions on how international trade affects the labour market. In this spirit, this paper aims to investigate the impact of...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the relation between the Border Effect and industrial concentration. This is achieved by founding this relation on the Home Market Effect and testing the robustness of this foundation through an application to the European Single Market. A sectorial...

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the quality content of Chinese exports and to what extent China imposes a threat to the market positions of advanced economies. While China’s export structure is very similar to that of the advanced world, its export unit values are well below...

This paper investigates the relationship between bilateral FDI positions and cross-country business cycle correlations in the period 1982–2001. We find that countries that have comparatively intensive FDI relations also have more synchronized business cycles during 1995–2001. Before 1995, we...

Does schooling generate social returns in excess of the private returns captured by the individual who makes the human capital investment? As a strategy to detect human capital externalities I use Dutch survey data to estimate the impact of the average human capital stock in a region on...

Analyzing data from the Structure of Earnings Surveys we find that wage dispersion in Austria increased marginally between 1996 and 2002. There was an increase in the returns to education which accrued only to male workers. The positive effects of tenure and especially of experience on wages...

Using the Albrecht et al. (2003) version of the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition technique along the wage distribution, we find that immigrant workers do not affect changes in the Czech wage structure between 2002 and 2006 despite their substantial inflows. Instead, changes in the wage...

Survey results in 15 European countries for almost 15,000 firms reveal that Belgian firms react more than the average European firm to adverse shocks by reducing permanent and temporary employment. On the basis of a firm-level analysis, this paper confirms that the different reaction to shocks...