This paper discusses the channels between openness and productivity and trade hampering factors. The stylized facts from the heterogeneous firms literature suggests that firms face market entry costs for each new product they export and to each new export market. Transport costs, border costs...

Im Folgenden werden ausgewählte Ergebnisse einer neuen Datenquelle zur Messung von Wachstum und Produktivität im internationalen Vergleich präsentiert. Die Informationen decken den Zeitraum von 1970 bis 2004 ab. Sie zeigen, dass Deutschland seine langjährige Wachstumsführerschaft in Europa...

Composition of the euro area workforce evolves over time and in response to changing labour market conditions. We construct an estimate of growth in euro area labour quality over the period 1983-2004 and show that labour quality has grown on average by 0.6% year-on-year over this time period....

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the empirical relevance of real convergence on the process of nominal convergence for the new EU Member States. We discuss two of the main channels through which real convergence could affect relative prices with respect to the euro area: productivity...

What determines a country's ability to compete in international markets? What fosters the global competitiveness of its firms? And in the European context, have key elements of the EU strategy such as EMU and enlargement helped or hindered domestic firms' competitiveness in local and global...

We develop a framework for analyzing “medium-run” departures from balanced growth, and apply it to the economies of continental Europe. A time-varying factor-augmenting production function (mimicking “directed” technical change) with a below-unitary substitution elasticity coupled with...

The present System of National Accounts (SNA93) treats durable consumption goods as consumption goods rather than investment although rentals for owner occupied households is imputed into GDP. We argue that households de facto treat the purchase of durable goods as investments and thus, the...

This paper focuses on the euro area wage structure and its potential determinants from a sectoral viewpoint. Merging information from the OECD Structural Analysis database with data from the EU Labour Force Survey, we construct a cross-country panel of 22 industries in 8 euro area countries for...

Banks do not charge explicit fees for many of the services they provide but the service payment is bundled with the offered interest rates. This output therefore has to be imputed using estimates of the opportunity cost of funds. We argue that rather than using the single short-term, low-risk...

We use a new data set for European manufacturing firms to assess whether a short term technological convergence process has been taking place among manufacturing firms in seven European countries. The empirical analysis aims to study the effects of international co-operative R&D on short term...