In order to facilitate employment adjustment by firms and to reduce the unemployment rate, legislation regarding temporary employment has been relaxed in Belgium (as in most European countries) over the last 20 years. Accordingly, the share of temporary employment as a percentage of total...

This paper investigates the impact of international trade on wage dispersion in a small open economy, Belgium. It is one of the few to: (i) use detailed, matched employer-employee data to compute industry wage premia and disaggregated industry-level panel data to examine the impact of changes in...

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate...

Comparing air service growth in Amsterdam and Brussels, this paper aims to understand how the strategies of airlines and public authorities allow certain medium-sized cities to succeed in exceeding their local market by connecting passengers, while others do not. In contrast to Brussels,...

We consider the testable implications of the Cournot model of market competition. Our approach is nonparametric in the sense that we abstain from imposing any functional specification on market demand and firm cost functions. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for (reduced form)...

This paper reviews the pattern of bank failures during the financial crisis and asks whether there was a link with corporate governance. It revisits the theory of bank governance and suggests a multi-constituency approach that emphasizes the role of weak creditors. The empirical evidence...