The recent changes in the national accounts unequivocally imply that the nature of the measured growth rate and business cycle has changed. This note investigates to what extent.

This paper investigates whether European electricity market refirms have induced any changes infirm efficiency either through productive, allocative or dynamic efficiency improve- ments. In particular, this ex-post analysis looks closely at productivity e ects of changing industry structure,...

We apply a simple method to study the relative quality of Chinese versus European products exported in the clothing sector after the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement. Based on the model of Foster et al (2008), we interpret the relative change of export prices and quantities sold in narrowly...

This paper analyses the distributional effects of decoupled Single firm Payments (SFP) in the European Union. In a static world the SFP benefit only firmers, irrespective of the implemented SFP model and irrespective of whether entitlements are tradable or not, except when the size of the...

This paper presents an ex-post empirical analysis of the impact of European electricity mar- ket refirms on markups ofirms. The working hypothesis is that further economic integration would bring competition into electricity markets re ected by lower markups of electricityfirms. The results show...

This paper tests the endogeneity hypothesis of OCA criteria (Frankel and Rose, 1998) in a cross-section of OECD countries between 1990 and 1999. It is shown that intraindustry trade actually causes the convergence of business cycles, while there is no direct relation between business cycles and...

Over the last two decades the share of national income which accrues to labour has followed a marked downward trend across a host of industrialised countries. This paper attempts to assess the importance of several potential causes of this phenomenon. We investigate compositional effects, the...

This paper studies whether trade integration between the EU15 and Central Europe has led to more export specialization in Central Europe. Moreover, we analyze the impact of institutional refirms in Central Europe on export specialization. The empirical analysis is set up for thirteen Central...

Multinational companies and national governments pay considerable attention to labor cost and labor productivity differentials across countries. This paper analyzes total and unit labor differentials for a group of European and non-European countries in the 1960-1998 period. It deals with (i)...

We estimate how trade openness affects the relationship between wages, labour productivity and foreign wages using sector-level time series for several EU member states. In some countries wages became less responsive to foreign wages as trade costs declined. We show this counter-intuitive result...