Under numerical fiscal rules, such as those underpinning EMU, governments have strong temptations to use accounting tricks to meet the fiscal constraints. Given these political incentives, fiscal variables that in the past were regarded as a mere residual acquire a strategic role. This is the...

The EU-US total factor productivity (TFP) growth gap since the mid-1990's is concentrated in a handful of market service industries (most notably retail trade) and in ICT-producing manufacturing, whilst the EU exhibits a stronger performance in a number of the network utilities. This paper...

This Paper provides a cross-country perspective to the firm-level analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and labour demand. We estimate labour demand equations in 11 European countries using dynamic panel data techniques on samples that permit to distinguish the ownership status of...

We study the effect of 'globalization' on wage inequality. Our 'global' economy resembles Rosen's (1981) 'Superstars' economy, where a) innovations in production and communication technologies enable suppliers to reach a larger mass of consumers and to improve the (perceived) quality of their...

We introduce incomplete outsourcing contracts in an otherwise standard model of MNEs based on the trade-off between proximity and concentration. This has implications for the choice between export and FDI and the way this is affected by the distance between source and host countries. In...

In this paper we investigate the firm-specific factors that account for the decision to invest in low-wage countries on the part of Italian firms in the textiles and clothing sector. This analysis is motivated by the fact that our survey data show, between 1990 and 1997, a decline of average...