Promoting competition to enhance productivity at the firm level and resulting income and growth improvement and a lower cost of living is an important economic and social challenge in Israel. Consistent evidence shows multiple deficiencies leading to a dual functioning of the economy between...

Canada’s productivity performance has lagged that of many other OECD countries, despite some improvement in recent years. One measure to enhance overall efficiency would be to strengthen competition on the domestic market to drive future multi-factor productivity improvements. The potential...

Concerns about market power and competition in the agri-food sector are widespread, with commentators regularly suggesting that farmers are in a structurally weaker position than other actors, who therefore benefit at their expense. The evidence reviewed in this paper indicates that downstream...

This study focuses on collaborative economy platforms that specialize in purely digital tasks that require no physical delivery or proximity between workers and their clients, which we call Online Labour Markets (OLMs). They have a global reach. There is a debate on job fragmentation and...

In a growing number of OECD countries policymakers are designing specific regulations for lending-based crowdfunding platforms. In March 2018, as a part of its Fintech action plan, the European Commission also presented its proposal for the EU-wide passporting regime. To evaluate these new...

Policy efforts to revitalise entrepreneurship and investment in Spain are key to generating growth and new jobs. The government has a substantial reform program to make it easier to do business in Spain, which should in some cases be deepened. Boosting economic growth requires a new generation...

We explore whether there is a gender wage gap in one of the largest EU online labor markets. We provide empirical evidence for a statistically significant 4% gender wage gap among workers. We also find that female workers propose lower wage bills and are more likely to win the competition for...

A basic assumption in the economic literature is the one of diminishing marginal returns to labour. However, theoretical studies on knowledge and labour specialization assume that an increase in the knowledge investment embodied in the human capital of workers raises the marginal product of...

This paper investigates the links between the market capability of top corporate R&D investors (EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboards), as captured by trademark data and their economic performance in terms of net sales growth. It provides empirical evidence to better understand the extent to...

In this work, we develop and apply a methodology to estimate technology-specific R&D investments at the firm level and then use these to test some arguments that have become central in the innovation literature. In particular, we first combine R&D investments with patent data of the world top...