Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

Panel unit root tests of real exchange rates - as opposed to univariate tests - usually reject non-stationarity. These tests, however, could be biased if the real exchange rate contained MA roots. Indeed, two independent arguments claim that the real exchange rate, being a sum of a stationary...

A novel linked employer-employee data set documents that expanding multinational enterprises retain more domestic jobs than competitors without foreign expansions. In contrast to prior research, a propensity score estimator allows enterprise performance to vary with foreign direct investment...

This paper shows that the substantial disparity in German bank lending towards industrial (IC) and non-industrial (Non-IC) countries is largely explained by differences in countries' endowments and only to a minor extent by German banks' different treatment of these country groups. This is...

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between exchange rate uncertainty and international trade. In empirical studies the estimated impacts of exchange rate uncertainty on trade figures are at most weak and often ambiguous with respect to their...

There are over 180 ILO conventions in many areas of labour law, industrial relations and social security, but they are not ratified universally: for the conventions adopted between 1975 and 1995, the cumulated probability of ratification is about 13 per cent ten years after their adoption. In...

Optimization of international securitized real estate portfolios has been a key topic for several decades. However, most previous analysis has focused on regional diversification by applying the traditional mean-variance (MV) framework suggested by Markowitz (1952) even if the limitations of...

We investigate the long run relationship between private consumption, disposable income and wealth approximated by equity and house price indices for a panel of 15 industrialized countries. Consumption, income and wealth are cointegrated in their common components. The impact of house prices...