The objectives of this paper are to study the impact of liberalisation on trade deficits and current accounts of developing countries. It is expected that trade liberalisation would promote economic growth from the supply side by leading to a more efficient use of resources, by encouraging...

This paper deals with the development of regional income disparities and convergence processes in the countries of the European Union. Overall, 861 regions – mainly at the regional level NUTS-3 – of the EU enlarged in May 2004 are analysed for the period 1995 - 2003. We use the two classical...

Wage and productivity effects of training are compared to study how the training rent is shared between employers and employees. With panel data from 1996-2002, I analyse the impact of continuing training on wages and productivity in a Cobb-Douglas production framework. Using system GMM...

More than one third of the European Union's total budget is spent on socalled Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to promote the development of the EU and to support convergence between the levels of development of the various European regions. Investigating the impact...

The impact of technology on the demand for heterogeneous labor is controversely discussed throughout the literature. New technology which is said to favor high skilled labor and to substitute low skilled labor is often considered as the main reason for the decline in relative demand for low...

We examine the scope and value of targeted advertising in the magazine industry. We use data on reader characteristics at individual media, in contrast to previous work that has needed to infer this information from aggregate data. Our results show a strong relationship between subscriber...

This paper considers spatial autoregressive panel data models and extends their analysis to the case where the spatial coefficients differ across the spatial units. It derives conditions under which the spatial coefficients are identified and develops a quasi maximum likelihood (QML) estimation...

This paper considers a class of GMM estimators for general dynamic panel models, allowing for cross sectional dependence due to spatial lags and due to unspecified common shocks. We significantly expand the scope of the existing literature by allowing for endogenous spatial weight matrices,...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...

Multinational firms transfer to their foreign affiliates superior technology, leading to higher productivity of their workers and therefore to higher wages, or so the often cited rent-sharing theory of multinational firms explains. But studies have shown that oftentimes, this results not from...