This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

A large literature links wage inequality to technology, but it does not explicitly consider whether innovation contributes to shaping wage inequalities within firms. In this work we seek to fill this gap, exploiting a representative matched employer–employee survey on firms active in major...

This paper is the first to study the distinct effects of Information Technologies (IT) and Communication Technologies (CT) on labour, and in particular, on the relative demand for skill. The analysis is conducted on a sample covering the bulk of economic activity in 10 developed countries during...

This paper draws on the OportUnidad project co-funded with support by the European Commission under the EuropeAidALFA III Programme. OportUnidad multi-actors include twelve Universities from Europe and Latin America (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Portugal,...

In pre-industrial Europe, growth was driven by the expansion of trade, and the expansion of trade was driven by falling trading costs. This paper discusses the mechanisms linking these processes: profit-seeking behavior by merchants, changes in the organization of production, technological...

World Pensions Council cofounders Vincent Bazi and M. Nicolas J. Firzli analyse the rise of natural gas as a new asset class for pension and sovereign fund stakeholders in light of the geo-institutional dynamics underpinning asset allocation and investment decisions in an era of macroeconomic...

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the development of an evidence-based system to monitor progress towards the European Research Area (ERA) and a knowledge-based economy. We start with an overview of existing theory and empirical evidence on the role of international technology...

We examine the evolution of industrial output in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania over the period 1989-1995 in terms of product trade orientation prior to the transition process, some products traded in a market economy while others traded in the artificial market of the Soviet Bloc. We...

Theoretical models of growth reveal that either exogenous or endogenous, technology is the main driving force behind the long-run economic growth. Furthermore, in the endogenous growth framework, diffusion of technology is the basic mechanism of per capita income convergence among countries....

We examine industrial output in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania during 1989-95 in terms of pretransitional product trade orientation. The growth of EU-oriented output within sectors of industry, ex-post trade, and market liberalization, is modeled as foreign direct investment induced...