Whether or not the use of remote work increases firm labour productivity is theoretically ambiguous. We use a rich and representative sample of Portuguese firms, and within-firm variation in the policy on remote work, over the period 2011-2016, to empirically assess the causal productivity...

The Bologna process aims at creating a European Higher Education Area where inter-country mobility of students and staff, as well as workers holding a degree, is facilitated. While several aspects of the process deserve wide public support, the reduction of the length of the first cycle of...

The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic difference in the education level between census data and observations...

This study documents two empirical regularities, using data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm (Last In, First Out; LIFO). Second, workers' wages rise with seniority (= a worker's tenure relative to the tenure of her colleagues). We seek...

We attempt to answer a simple empirical question: does having children make a parent live longer? The hypothesis we offer is that a parent's immune system is refreshed by a child's infections at a time when their own protection starts wearing thin. With the boosted immune system, the parent has...

We document the relationship of a set of individual choices - including parenthood, marital state, and income - with an individual’s cause of death. Using the data set of the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS) which follows one percent of the population of England and...

Policy makers use reference pricing to curb pharmaceutical expenditures by reducing coverage of expensive branded drugs. In a theoretical analysis we show that the net effect of reference pricing is generally ambiguous when accounting for entry by generic producers. Reference pricing shifts...

We examine how a downstream merger affects input prices and, in turn, the profitability of a such a merger under Cournot competition with differentiated products. Input suppliers can be interpreted as ordinary upstream firms, or trade unions organising workers. If the input suppliers are...

We study a policy game between exporting and importing countries in vertically linked industries. In a successive international Cournot oligopoly, we analyse incentives for using tax instruments strategically to shift rents vertically, between exporting and importing countries, and horizontally,...

We analyze unionized firms? incentives to outsource intermediate goods production to foreign (low-cost) subcontractors. Such outsourcing leads to increased wages for the remaining inhouse production. We find that stronger unions, which imply higher domestic wages, reduce incentives for...