The paper explores the role of workers' expectations as am original explanation for the puzzling long run persistence of discrimination against some minorities in the labor market. A game of incomplete information is presented, showing that ex ante identical groups of workers may be...

This paper focuses on the pattern of returns to scale and productivity growth in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic counterparts. Moreover, foreign...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. The specification of the central bank objective is general...

We use the results of a 1993 survey of EuropeÕs largest firms to explore the effect of proximity on knowledge flows from suppliers, customers, joint ventures, competitors and public research organisations to innovative firms. The focus is on the latter, since they are an essential component of...

In this paper, we consider the extent to which R&D outsourcing and centralisation of R&D within the firm varies depending on the products that the firm produces and how applied the R&D is to a particular product. We find that, in general, the most applied type of R&D is more likely to be...

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

This paper investigates in a consistent semi-structural empirical framework three current issues of monetary policy in the euro area. First, regarding policy transmission we offer a three-stage procedure to combine the efficient estimation of economic structure prior to EMU with current ECB...

This paper examines how unionisation structures that differ in the degree of wage centralisation affect firms' incentives to increase labour productivity. We distinguish three modes of unionisation with increasing degree of centralisation. (1) "Decentralisation" where wages are determined...

Inequity aversion is a special form of other regarding preferences and captures many features of reciprocal behavior, an apparently robust pattern in human nature. Using this concept we analyze the Moral Hazard problem and derive several results which differ from conventional contract theory....

This paper investigates the movement of cohort wages in an internal labour market of a large British financial institution. The main objective of the analysis is to establish whether movements of cohort wages over time in this particular institution are consistent with the theoretical notion of...