Firms have multiple options at the time of adjusting their wage bills. However, previous literature has mainly focused on base wages. We broaden the analysis beyond downward rigidity in base wages by investigating the use of other margins of labour cost adjustment at the firm level. Using data...

Despite the importance of understanding and estimating the “stickiness” of prices of goods and services, empirical assessment of price setting behaviour by firms has remained relatively limited. This is the first paper to provide detailed information on the pressures, manner and frequency...

This paper uses a gravity model approach in order to analyse the geographical patterns of Irish exports. The gravity model in international trade has been demonstrated to be an extremely robust empirical method. The gravity model is first applied to aggregate Irish exports from 1980 to 2007....

While growth in output and employment remains relatively strong in the Irish economy, there has been considerable focus recently on some high-profile job losses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. This paper places these developments within a broader context and shows that aggregate...

One of the most robust empirical results in international economics is the existence of a negative relationship between trade flows and distance. More recent research on exporting activity at the firm level has established an apparently equally robust result---few firms export, and exporting...

This paper presents an extension of the analysis of the geographic dimension of trade, by examining the trading patterns of individual firms. Aggregate data does not tell us if a sector is geographically diversified because there are many exporting firms, each of which specialises in a separate...

The negative relationship between host-country tax rates and FDI has been tested in a large number of papers. This paper looks at a different channel through which tax systems could affect FDI, namely the complexity of the tax system. Complying with tax authority requirements can be extremely...

Calvo-style models of nominal rigidities currently provide the dominant paradigm for understanding the linkages between wage and price dynamics. Recent empirical implementations stress the idea that these models link inflation to the behavior of the labour share of income. Galí, Gertler, and...

Two recent trends in international economics have been an increased focus on the geography of trade (e.g. what factors determine where a country exports to) and the emergence of empirical work examining firm-level data on exporting activity. However, data limitations have prevented there being...

The causality from outsourcing, defined as the procurement of inputs from outside the boundaries of the firm, to productivity is tested for a large panel of Irish manufacturing firms. Theory suggests that as firms outsource more 'non-core' activities to specialized providers, productivity due to...