The international press has recently reported on the widely-held view in the financial markets that the movement of the Belgian industrial confidence indicator might precede the euro area business cycles. The initial purpose of this paper is to assess whether this market perception is more than...

This study exploits the reduction of weekly working hours from 48 to 45 occured in Chile in January 2005. We use this pure and exogenous policy change to identify the employment effects of such a policy. Our main contribution is that we overcome the problems of previous studies such as :...

The frequency of upgrades in technology markets is not socially optimal when the quality improvement is negligible and smaller than the adoption cost of the new product. In monopolies, the literature has identified a sufficient factor for efficient upgrading: the firm’s power to commit to...