Young people entering the job market are in a precarious economic position. Across Europe, and in Belgium in particular, those who wish to enter into the professional world are faced with the de facto mandate that in order to gain experience and build the connections that will enable them to...

Wal-Mart matters to the form and substance of law and social reform in several distinct ways. This article describes Wal-Mart as serving three key purposes - as target, symbol, and model - in the contemporary social reform landscape. First, Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the United States is...

The paper analyses the development of trafficking in human beings (THB) as an economic crime and as a severe violation of human rights by focusing on the different actors' involved in counter-trafficking efforts. The paper outlines how the crime evolved in Austria, Germany and the United States...

Using harmonised data from the European Union Household Panel, we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for ten countries. We find that the mean gender pay gap in the raw data typically hides large variations in the gap across the wages distribution. We use quantile...

The paper uses quarterly GDP data for some 30 years up to and including 2001, to examine the identity and development of the European business cycle. Cycles are identified by using a band-pass filter version of the Hodrick-Prescott filter and affiliations are examined using clustering techniques...

A persistent criticism of general equilibrium models of monetary policy which incorporate nominal inertia in the form of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) is that they fail to capture the extent of inflation inertia in the data. In this paper we derive a general equilibrium model based on...

The studies summarised in this paper focus on the economic implications of euro area firms’ participation in global value chains (GVCs). They show how, and to what extent, a large set of economic variables and inter-linkages have been affected by international production sharing. The core...

This paper uses scanner data from a large euro area retailer. We extend Deaton and Muellbauer's Almost Ideal Demand System to estimate the price elasticity and curvature of demand for a wide range of products. Our results support the introduction of a kinked (concave) demand curve in general...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

This paper estimates a DSGE model with many types of shocks and frictions for both the US and the euro area economy over a common sample period (1974-2002). The structural estimation methodology allows us to investigate whether differences in business cycle behaviour are due to differences in...