This paper examines the direct effects of corporate tax on firm productivity along with the interaction effects of tax policy and R&D activity on productivity at firm level for over 13,062 firms during 2004-2011. Our main findings are first, that there is evidence for productivity convergence...

This paper estimates a monetary policy reaction function for the ECB over the period 1999-2009. To allow for a potential shift in interest rate setting during the financial crisis, we permit a smooth transition from one set of parameters to another. The estimates show a swift change in the...

In this paper we analyze the trend of the gender gap between wives and husbands for Mediterranean countries with a strong family tradition, using data from the European Household Panel (ECHP) of 2001 and the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of 2006. In general, wives and...

Traditional autocorrelation and variance ratio tests are based on serial uncorrelatedness rather than martingale difference. As such, they do not capture potential nonlinearity-in-mean, which could lead to misleading inferences in favor of the martingale hypothesis. This paper employs various...

The paper elaborates on the employment intensity of growth. Previous evidence regarding this question is surveyed. Empirical results concerning Europe and selected other industrial countries reveal that the cyclical link between unemployment and growth is still stable in the nineties. However,...