This paper evaluates the effects on employment, job turnover and productivity of a labor market reform in Spain that eliminated dismissal costs for fixed-term or temporary contracts. Our empirical results are based on a panel of 2356 Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1982-1993. We...

Recent studies have found evidence for the complementarity between white-collar labor and technological capital. However, the estimated elasticities appear too small to explain the observed changes in labor occupational structure. Most of the increases in the share of white collar employment...

This (revised) study seeks to examine the rise, expansion, and ultimate decline of the Italian wool-based textile industries over a period of six centuries (from ca. 1100 to ca. 1730). An international trade model combining transaction costs and comparative advantage is employed to explain the...

This paper seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the nouvelles draperies chose to use them, and why their resort to such merino wools allowed at least some of them to escape the...

This paper, a much revised version of an earlier paper (with different tables), seeks to explain why Spanish merino wools arrived so late in the Low Countries, only from the 1420s, why initially only those cloth producers known as the nouvelles draperies chose to use them, and why their resort...