Do firms choose inputs that minimize their cost of production, ignoring the attitudes of their owners and employees? We examine this question using an episode of worsening relations between the US and France: from February 2002 to March 2003, France's favorability rating in US public opinion...

This study seeks to increase our understanding of worker reactions to shirking by analyzing two new questionson shirking from the 2002 General Social Science Survey (GSS). We developed the questions in order toilluminate the factors that enable some shared capitalist enterprises to overcome the...

This paper examines the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity, paying particular attention totwo issues neglected in the existing literature - the role of multinationals in service sectors and the importanceof R&D activity conducted by foreign multinationals. We review existing...

This paper analyzes mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a previously neglected channel of industrial restructuring in the face of trade liberalization. Using the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement of 1989 as a natural experiment, I show that trade liberalization leads to a significant...

Consistent with a growing number of models about affect and behaviour and with arecognition that perception alone provides no impetus for action, it was predicted thatassociations between company climate and productivity would be mediated by average levelof job satisfaction. In a study of 42...

This paper shows that, with (partial) irreversibility, higher uncertainty reduces the impact effect of demand shocks on investment. Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or disinvesting. This is confirmed both numerically for a model with a rich mix...

This paper considers the impact of taxation policy on market work. On the basis of theevidence, we find that a 10 percentage point rise in the tax wedge will reduce overall labourinput provided via the market by around 2 per cent of the population of working age. The taxwedge is the sum of the...

The EMU accession countries are obliged to fulfill the Maastricht convergence criteria prior to entering the EMU. What should be the optimal monetary policy satisfying these criteria? To answer this question, the paper proposes a DSGE model of a two-sector small open economy. First, I derive the...

This paper investigates the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on growth in an economy, consisting of three sectors, ICT-producing, ICT-using and non-ICT-using. The benefits from ICT come from the falling prices of the ICT-using sector's good, which is used for the...

In this paper, we show that ownership structures vary considerably across Europe, and that the dominant form ofownership is not necessarily the most efficient one. These findings are in contradiction to similar research basedon US samples. The results also demonstrate that firms without a...