In a mobile labor market, a high emigration rate of high skilled workers is not necessarily a problem, if counterbalanced by a high immigration rate. However, some countries experience a net gain of high skilled while others a net loss. Corruption is part of the explanation, acting through two...

This paper uses detailed micro data on service exports at the firm-destination-service level to analyse the role of firm heterogeneity in shaping aggregate service exports in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain from 2003 to 2007. We decompose the level and the growth of aggregate service exports...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of the dramatic increase in services tradability focusing on the extensive margin of the phenomenon. We use balance sheet and firm-level service trade information over the period 1995-2005 provided by the National Bank of Belgium and we merge it with...

During the 2008-2009 crisis trade in goods experienced the deepest decline ever recorded. Surprisingly, trade in services came through the crisis unscathed and some service categories carelessly stuck to their growth paths. Using firm-product-destination exports for Belgium, we show that the...

In this paper, we provide new explanations for the puzzling findings in the literature that migrants do not decrease natives’ wages, and that skilled immigration can actually increase them. We develop a model with regional labor markets and heterogeneous firms in which workers of different...