This article reviews beer production, consumption and the industrial organization of breweries throughout history. Monasteries were the centers of the beer economy in the early Middle Ages. Innovation and increased demand later induced the growth of commercial breweries. Globalization and...

Recently, the European Commission has proposed to introduce a new mi- gration policy instrument - Blue Cards - to attract highly skilled workers from abroad by lifting labour market restrictions, offering financial and housing ben- efits. The excludability character of human capital suggests...

This study uses a new, innovative measure of trade protection and finds that less trade protection is associated with higher income per capita, using data from 131 developed and developing countries.

This paper presents an ex-post empirical analysis of the impact of European electricity mar- ket reforms on markups of rms. The working hypothesis is that further economic integration would bring competition into electricity markets re ected by lower markups of electricity rms. The results show...

This paper investigates whether European electricity market reforms have induced any changes in rm eciency either through productive, allocative or dynamic eciency improve- ments. In particular, this ex-post analysis looks closely at productivity e ects of changing industry structure, ownership...

Economists most often analyse the effects of protectionist or antidumping policies in the context of tariffs or voluntary export restraints - the latter are very similar to quotas in fact. Antidumping policies in the European Union however make frequent use of price undertakings. Whereas the...

In this paper we study the determinants of the factor content of the CEE agricultural trade. Examining empirically three hypothesis, which relate cross-country differences in technology, relative factor abundance and transaction costs and market imperfections to the factor content of trade we...

The paper examines implications of endogenous growth theory on the relationship between firm productivity, innovation as well as productivity growth by combining information on firm-level innovation (CIS) with accounting data for a large sample of Slovenian firms in the period 1996-2002. We...

This paper adds a new dimension to the recent literature on relationship beween firm's heterogeneity in terms of total factor productivity and its dynamic exports vs. FDI decision, namely the heterogeneity of export markets. We show that higher productivity of investing firms relative to just...

Advocates of antidumping (AD) laws downplay their effects by arguing that the trade flows that are subject to AD are small and their distortions negligible. This paper is the first to counter that notion by quantifying the worldwide effect of AD laws on aggregate trade flows. The recent...