The Euro Plus Pact was approved by 23 EU countries in March 2011 and came into force shortly afterwards. The Pact stipulates a range of quantitative targets meant to strengthen cost competitiveness with the aim of preventing the accumulation of external financial imbalances. This paper uses...

Dustmann/ Fitzenberger/ Schönberg/ Spitz-Oener (2014) praise the flexibility of German labour market institutions for the German turn-around from "Sick Man of Europe to Economic Superstar": The more decentralized, firm-specific wage-setting process since the mid-1990s increased wage inequality...

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...

Productivity developments have been rather divergent across EU countries and particularly between Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and elsewhere in the continent (non-CEE). How is such phenomenon related to wage bargaining institutions? Starting from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) shock, we...

This paper examines international cooperation on technological development as an alternative to international cooperation on GHG emission reductions. In order to analyze the scope of cooperation, a three-stage technology agreement formation game is solved. First, countries decide whether or not...

This paper assesses whether European firms' innovative performance is impacted by investments in training directly aimed at developing and/or introducing innovation, in addition to the scale of a firm's investments in innovation proxied by the number of R&D personnels. In particular, it explores...