Research on intergenerational income mobility has shown stronger persistence between parental and offspring's income in the UK than in Sweden. We use similar data sets for the two countries to explore whether these cross-national differences show up already early in offspring's life in outcomes...

With young people among the big losers of the recent financial crisis, vocational education and training (VET) is often seen as the silver bullet to the problem of youth joblessness. This paper provides a better understanding of VET around the world, dealing with three types of vocational...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...

We experimentally investigate the nature of cooperation in various repeated games, with subjects from Romania and USA. We find stark cross-country differences in the propensity to sustain multilateral cooperation through bilateral rewards and punishments. U.S. groups perform well because...

This paper analyses and compares the roles which Belgium and Italy have played in the process of European monetary integration. It discusses Belgian and Italian attitudes towards European integration and EMU, exchange rate policies, key concepts of the Belgian and Italian EMU strategies and the...

The use of input-output analysis for the computation of secondary effects of final demand changes is well-known. These 'final demand effects' can be calculated using technical coefficients and the inverse of the Leontief matrix. This paper offers an alternative to the use of technical...

The economic impact of the port sector is usually measured at an aggregate level by indicators such as value added, employment and investment. This paper tries to define the economic relevance for the regional as well as for the national economy at a disaggregate level. It attempts to identify,...

In many European countries, the majority of workers have their wage rates determined directly by industry-level agreements. For some workers, industry agreements are supplemented by firm-specific agreements. Yet, the relative importance of individual company and industry agreements (in other...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

In this paper a semiparametric stochastic metafrontier approach is used to obtain insight into firmlevel competitiveness in Europe. We differ from standard TFP studies at the firm level as we simultaneously allow for inefficiency, noise and do not impose a functional form on the input-output...