In Germany, there is no trade union membership wage premium, while the membership fee amounts to 1% of the gross wage. Therefore, prima facie, there are strong incentives to free-ride on the benefits of trade unionism. We establish empirical evidence for a private gain from trade union...

We document that trust in public institutions – and particularly trust in banks, business and government – has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear...

We document that trust in public institutions—and particularly trust in banks, business and government—has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear...

The flexicurity approach claims a positive effect of flexible labour on firm performance, also through an increased ability to innovate. Critics consider it a deregulation of the labour market, decreasing investment in human capital and innovation. We contribute to this broad debate providing an...

The knowledge of the overall willingness-to-pay and the specific price premiums consumers accept when buying foods with less fat, saturated fat, sodium, sugar and more fiber shapes food manufacturer and distributor marketing strategies and supports the development of public health strategies....

This paper introduces service innovation in the proximity-concentration trade-off model of trade and FDI (Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple, 2004). The idea is that innovation will have two main effects on service firms’ choice between exports and FDI. First, innovative firms will on average have...

In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of wage and price adjustment practices in Estonia, drawing from two managerial surveys which were conducted in autumn 2007 and summer 2009 within the framework of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN), a joint research project by the Eurosystem/ESCB. Our...

Chartist and fundamentalist models have proven to be capable of replicating stylized facts on speculative markets. In general, this is achieved by specifying nonlinear interactions of otherwise linear asset price expectations of the respective trader groups. This paper investigates whether or...

Through explicitly incorporating analysts' forecasts as observable factors in a dynamic arbitrage-free model of the yield curve, this research proposes a framework for studying the impact of shifts in market sentiment on interest rates of all maturities. An empirical examination reveals that...

From a theoretical perspective, the output gap is probably the most comprehensive and convincing concept to describe the cyclical position of an economy. Unfortunately, for practical purposes, the concept depends on the determination of potential output, which is an inherently unobservable...