Investment in intangible assets has become an increasingly important driver of productivity growth in OECD countries. Facing stronger informational asymmetries and harder to value collateral, intangible investment is subject to more severe financial constraints and relies more on internal rather...

This paper uses a novel empirical approach to assess if the development of online platforms affects the productivity of service firms. We build a proxy measure of platform use across four industries (hotels, restaurants, taxis and retail trade) and ten OECD countries using internet search data...

Spain is a highly decentralised country, making the effective implementation of national reforms dependent on regional policies. Some regional disparities are high and need to be reduced. High regional dispersion in education and job outcomes, compounded by low inter-regional mobility, emerge as...

The rapid emergence of gig economy platforms that use digital technologies to intermediate labour on a per-task basis has triggered an intense policy debate about the economic and social implications. This paper takes stock of the emerging evidence. The results suggest that gig economy...

Roma account for almost one-tenth of the population in the Slovak Republic. They live mostly excluded from the general population in concentrated settlements, separated neighbourhoods or ghettos. The majority live in poverty and face social exclusion in almost all aspects of everyday life. Only...

Heavy involvement in international trade and global value chains has been an effective way for promoting Slovakia's economic and social catch-up. Large foreign direct investment inflows have helped develop a competitive export-led manufacturing industry, with a strong specialisation in the...

The mission of the French High Commission for Pension Reform is to prepare the reform introducing a universal pension points system in France. This paper explains why implementing a universal points system in France would increase transparency, reduce inequality and generate efficiency gains for...

A decomposition of changes to participation rates of 55-to-74 year-olds between 2002 and 2017 based on an estimated equation attributes more than two thirds of the median increase (of 10.9 percentage points) to rising life expectancy and educational attainment. About 1 percentage point is...

Housing markets are large and highly volatile: they can thus create large macroeconomic risks. The current paper provides a bird’s eye view of where the housing markets of major OECD economies currently stand. It then uses the results of recently developed models to provide indications of...

Portugal’s export performance over the past decade has been impressive, helping to reduce external imbalances. This partly owed to a sequence of structural reforms that benefited the productivity of the export sector and led to an increase in its size. Nonetheless, exports as a share of GDP...