This paper sheds light on how changes in the organization of work can help to understand increasing wage inequality. We present a theoretical model in which workers with a wider span of competence (higher level of multitasking) earn a wage premium. Since abilities and opportunities to expand the...

This paper examines equilibrium growth and stability in the world economy using a North-South model in which there is assumed to be surplus labor in both North and South at an exogenously determined level of real wages. The model allows for substitution in consumption between primary commodities...

This paper investigates the effects of different degrees of wage setting centralisation on (1) the incentive of a MNE to locate in a host country, (2) the optimal level of investment it decides to commit to its foreign operation, and (3) the host country's welfare. Decentralised and centralised...

We construct a model in which oligopolistic firms decide where to locate. Firms choose to locate either in a country where employment protection implies costly output adjustments or in one without adjustment costs. Using a two-period three-stage game with uncertainty it is demonstrated that...

In this paper we examine optimal strategic trade policy under oligopoly with many home and foreign firms when the firms have different levels of efficiency. The first-best policy involves a structure of firm-specific export subsidies and export taxes in which the government favours the most...

Macroeconomic shocks and labour-market institutions jointly determine employment growth and economic performance. The effect of shocks depends on the nature of these institutions and the effect of institutional change depends on the macroeconomic environment. It follows that a given set of...

According to the ‘convergence hypothesis’, multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998)...

While foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers, the causes of this remain unresolved. In a two-period bargaining framework we show that if training is more productive and specific in foreign firms,...

Our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilizing a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries' outsourcing activities from input-output tables. This approach avoids problems such as aggregation bias, potential...

Using firm-level data for the UK, we investigate the link between firms’ financial health, borrowing ratio and export exit, paying special attention to the recent financial crisis. Our results show that deterioration in the financial position of firms has increased the hazard of export exit...