We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

The study aims at describing productivity growth in the manufacturing sector for a selected panel of five European countries using firm-level data. The paper explores the empirical regularities of firm productivity distribution across countries. In particular, we assess the degree of persistence...

This paper analyses the impact that firms financial position has on investment decisions using panel data from a large sample of non-financial corporations(around 120,000 firms) in six euro area countries(Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain). The results indicate that...

Im Jahr 2000 erwirtschafteten deutsche Unternehmen Gewinne, die nach Steuern 2,4 Prozent ihres Umsatzes erreichten. Damit lagen sie in einem 18-Länder-Vergleich an viertschlechtester Stelle. Geringere Nettoumsatzrenditen gab es nur noch in Tschechien, Italien und Polen. Eine tiefer gehende...

Disability insurance - the insurance against the loss of the ability to work - is a substantial part of social security expenditures in many countries. The benefit recipiency rates in disability insurance vary strikingly across European countries and the US. This paper investigates the extent...

In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of Employment Protection Legislation...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...