This paper decomposes wage bill changes at the firm level into components due to wage changes, and components due to net flows of employment. The analysis relies on an administrative employer-employee dataset of individual annual earnings matched with firms' annual accounts for Belgium over the...

This paper studies the relevance of strategic trade effects in the environmental policy for the European electricity sector. The production, investment and trade of electricity are modelled for four European countries. Three market regimes are distinguished: perfect competition, price regulation...

This paper evaluates the causal effects of exports to different destination countries using a comprehensive dataset on Belgian manufacturing firms from 1998 to 2005. Initial evidence suggests that, before export market entry, exporters to more developed economies have superior productivity...

This paper uses the Free Disposal Hull framework in order to assess the relative efficiency of Belgian general government in the field of health care, education and public order and safety. In order to do so, this paper aggregates a large number of outcome indicators. Several drawbacks indicate...

It is often argued that the baseline New-Keynesian model, which relies solely on the notion of infrequent price adjustment, cannot account for the observed degree of inflation sluggishness. Therefore it is a common practice among macro modellers to introduce an ad hoc additional source of...

This paper uses a frequency domain approach to gain insight into the correlation between survey indicators and year-on-year GDP growth. Using the Baxter-King filter, we split up each series into three components: a short-term, a business cycle (oscillations between 18 and 96 months) and a...

One of the most important predictions made in recent international trade literature based on heterogeneous firms concerns the within-industry job reallocation from firms not involved in international markets to those that are. This paper quantifies the extent of this reallocation using a dataset...

This paper evaluates the extent of downward nominal and real wage rigidity for different categories of workers and firms using the methodology recently developed by the International Wage Flexibility Project (Dickens and Goette, 2006). The analysis is based on an administrative data set on...

The aim of this study is to give an overview of recent developments in Belgium's direct investment relations with the rest of the world. The analysis is based mainly on two sets of statistics drawn up by the National Bank of Belgium, namely, data on direct investment flows from the balance of...

Temporal distribution of individual price changes is of crucial importance for business cycle theory and for the micro-foundations of price adjustment. While it is routinely assumed that price changes are staggered over time, both theory and evidence are ambiguous. We use a large Belgian data...