German unification hit the West German economy in a prosperous and appeared as a huge demand shock at least for the first few quarters. This combination resulted in a major increase of imports from the main trading partners of West Germany, which may have helped to cushion recessionary trends...

The British foreign exchange reserves decreased by 40 percent during the period August 1996-December 1999 although the Pound Sterling is considered a floating exchange rate since it left the EMS in 1992. Since changes in the level of foreign exchange reserves are usually taken as indicators for...

This paper analyses the determinants of employment reactions of firms when environmental innovations have been carried out. It differentiates hereby between employment increases and decreases. The data stem from a telephone survey covering more than 1500 firms in five European countries that...

This study examines managerial disciplining in poorly performing firms using large panels for Belgian, French, German and UK firms. We consider the monitoring role of large blockholders, the market for share blocks, creditors, and non-executive directors. Board restructuring is correlated to...

It is often noted that employment rates of females have been rising during the last decades. However, in contrast to men, women are often part-time employed and the allocation of working time over the life-cycle is linked to family formation. In addition, employment rates may differ across skill...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

This paper considers the shape invariant modelling approach in semiparametric regression estimation. Nonparametric functions of similar shape are linked by parametric transformations with unknown parameters. A computationally convenient estimation procedure is suggested. √N- consistency of the...

We model annual low pay transition probabilities taking account of three potentially endogenous selections: two sample drop-out mechanisms (panel attrition, non-employment) and "initial conditions" (base-year low pay status). This model, and variants that ignore one or more of these selection...

This paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends, by lessening local information spill-overs, to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto-correlation among local government...

The development of production, prices and employment in the EU electrical industry between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s is analysed in order to test the hypothesis that the competitive pressure from low-income countries has led to the observed decline of the employment share of low-skilled...