We find very fast convergence in productivity for the 99 3-digit European industries over the 1985-1998 period. According to our estimates half of any productivity gap is closed on average in 10 years. The speed of convergence is much higher than obtained previously in the literature....

Driven by growing internationalisation and high unemployment in Europe concerns about competition between regions and cities and it's consequences for economic and social standards are omnipresent. In their strive for "competitiveness" and a high position of their city in an "European City...

The paper characterises a number of welfare state models in the tradition of Esping-Andersen, analysing the economic and social performance of these different welfare regimes on an encompassing empirical basis both in the long run and with respect to their adaptability to the challenges of the...

This paper sets up a model of private consumption for selected EU countries with special emphasis on the impact of energy efficiency on energy demand. The analysis starts out from the idea that consumers' demand is a combination of a demand for "services" with a technological component. Demand...

The integration of migrant women and youth into the labour market depends upon institutional ramifications (in particular the immigration regime, the welfare model and the education system), on supply factors (in particular the educational attainment level and occupational skills, language...

This paper studies the R&D behaviour of fast growing SMEs using CIS III data for 16 countries. We group the countries into three groups that roughly have the same position in technological development. The first finding is that R&D is more important to high growth SMEs in countries that are...

This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the impact of acquisitions, initial public offerings and management buyouts on productivity and profitability of a large sample of Europe-based manufacturing companies covering the period from 1996 to 2005. At the center of our analysis is the...

This paper analyses the economic performance of European Regions and computes the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) using a panel cointegration approach. The main idea behind this choice is that this approach allows to directly estimate differences across economies in the production function and...

We provide evidence on the impact of globalisation on labour market outcomes analysing pay differences between foreign-acquired and domestically-owned firms. For this purpose, we use firm level data from 16 European countries over the time period 1999 to 2006. Applying propensity score matching...