In this paper, we develop a model of North-South trade to analyze the impact of a label certifying the absence of child labour in the export production of the South. When most eligible producers in the South can obtain the label, its impact is considerably reduced by a displacement effect...

This paper studies how outsourcing of services activities affects TFP at the firm level. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, we first document several new empirical facts about how firms engage in the outsourcing of supporting activities. We show that virtually all...

Despite competition concerns over the increasing dominance of global corporations, many argue that productivity spillovers from multinationals to domestic firms justify pro-FDI policies. For the first time, we use firm-to-firm transaction data in a developed country to examine the impact of...

This paper provides an updated overview of the network of Belgian business-to-business transactions from 2002 to 2021, building on the previous vintage of the dataset which covered 2002-2014. Leveraging data from VAT client lists, we establish a comprehensive and cohesive database detailing the...

We investigate the effects of input variety creation and destruction on both micro- and macroeconomic outcomes using detailed data from Belgium. Our microeconomic analysis establishes that the elasticity of downstream firms' marginal cost to supplier separation captures the area under the input...

The main purpose of this Working Paper is providing an overview of the economic importance of the Flemish maritime ports, the Liège port complex and the port of Brussels over the period 2014–2019 in terms of value added, employment and investment based on annual account figures. In 2019,...