This paper develops a model to analyse the implications of firing costs on incentives for R&D and international specialization. The key idea is that, to avoid paying firing costs, the country with a rigid labour market will tend to produce relatively secure goods, at late stages in their product...

The paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories. The basic idea is that, for the most part, different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories, and our...

Recent literature on international trade has established that the most productive firms become multinationals. But our data reveal a startling variation in productivity levels of foreign affiliates across the countries in Eastern Europe of the same European multinational parent firms suggesting...

This paper studies the extensive and intensive margins of firms' global sourcing decisions. We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which heterogeneous firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. The model delivers a simple...

The Paper investigates how foreign-owned and domestic firms in Hungary set their export prices. Using a unique dataset with firm and product-level data on trade flows, we find that foreign firms charge substantially lower export prices than domestic firms. This finding is robust after...

External knowledge is an important input for the innovation process of firms. Increasingly, this knowledge is likely to originate from outside of their national borders. This explains the preoccupation of policymakers with stimulating local technology transfers coming from international firms....

This Paper provides a theoretical model on the trade-offs an MNE face when assigning subsidiaries an active role in innovation and organizing its R&D decentralized versus centralized. R&D decentralization avoids having to adapt centrally developed innovations to local markets, being able to use...

Transferring low tech manufacturing jobs to cheap labour countries is often seen by part of the general public and policy makers as a step into the de-industrialisation of the European economies. However, several recent contributions have shown that the effects on home economies are rarely...

Foreign activities of MNEs have important effects on home economies. The debate is ambiguous: concerns that foreign investments deplete domestic economies are often coupled with the pride for doing good business in foreign countries. This Paper addresses this question by defining the appropriate...

Depending on the definition of the tax base, the statutory corporate tax rate implies rather different measures of effective average and marginal tax rates. This paper develops a model of a monopolistically competitive industry with extensive and intensive business investment and shows how these...