This paper studies the how government policy can influence positively public attitudes towards the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).

Although activation services such as monitoring, training, job subsidies or workfare have been shown to increase exits from unemployment, there is no evidence about their effects during recessions. We address this policy-relevant question by evaluating a large activation programme introduced in...

While recent changes to Fairtrade's governance structures aim to facilitate 'stronger voices' for producers (Fairtrade International 2011b), relatively little is known about the impact of these new structures on individuals. Utilizing Fung and Wright's (2003) framework of Empowered Participatory...

Using matched employer-employee data, we analyse the impact of immigrants on natives’ employment in Portugal. Using different model specifications, we show that the natives and immigrants are ‘complements’ at most occupation levels, in the sense that both types are hired when the number of...

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

Several countries extend collective bargaining agreements to entire sectors, therefore binding non-subscriber workers and employers. These extensions may address coordination issues but may also impose sector-specific minimum wages and other work conditions that are not appropriate for several...

We conduct a meta-analysis of more than 30 papers that study the causal relationship between exporting and firm productivity. Our results, robust to different specifications and to different weights for each observation, indicate that the impact of exporting upon productivity is higher 1) at...

France currently needs deep structural reforms to boost competitiveness; but such reforms seem impossible while France remains in the straitjacket of the rules-bound transfer union that is the current Eurozone. High outstanding sovereign debt coupled with almost zero economic growth pose a real...

This paper looks at trademarks and brands, beyond the conventional interests of marketing and law, as a way to explaining the evolution of international business and economies in general. It shows that the perspective defended by many scholars such as Chandler (1990), Wilkins (1991, 1994) and...

Using matched employer-employee panel data, we estimate measures of pay dispersion per firm-year that take into account both rm and worker unobserved heterogeneity. Unlike research that controls only for differences in observables, we nd that within-firm pay inequality is significantly...