In this paper we assess the current relevance of Ricardian theory. Relative prices, labor costs, and productivity are evaluated as determinants of a country's international competitiveness at the industry level. Working with detailed data on unit values and with industry data on productivity, we...

We study how total factor productivity (TFP), energy prices, and the Great Moderation are linked. First we estimate a joint stochastic process for the energy price and TFP and establish that until the second quarter of 1982, energy prices negatively affected productivity. This spillover has...

We investigate whether and to what extent multiple encompassing tests may help determine weights for forecast averaging in a standard vector autoregressive setting. To this end we consider a new test-based procedure, which assigns non-zero weights to candidate models that add information not...

The notion of new economy was coined in the United States when there was increasing evidence that, as a result of the introduction of new technologies, the traditional behavior of macroeconomic variables might have changed. The expansion of the 1990s differed from its predecessors in three...

During the next decades the populations of most developed countries will grow older as a result of the low level of birth rates since the 1970s and/or the continuously increasing life expectancy. We show within a Generational Accounting framework how unsustainable the public finances of France,...

This paper analyses the flexibility decision of firms. In particular we (a) ask whether the flexibility choice is influenced by market structure (concentration, market growth, ...), (b) compare the firms' actual choices with welfare maximising flexibility decisions (c) investigate the...

In this paper we present a computer-based model (so-called European Tax Analyzer) for the international computation and comparison of company tax burdens. The methodology follows the forward-looking concepts for the measurement of effective average tax rates (EATR) on the basis of a model-firm....

Productivity growth has been slow in many continental European countries over the last few decades, especially in comparison with the United States. It has been argued that lack of product market competition and poor corporate governance are two of the main reasons for this phenomenon. However,...

German unifikation hit the West German economy in a prosperous and appeared as a huge demand shock at least for the first few quarters. This combination resulted in a major increase of imports from the main trading partners of West Germany, which may have helped to cushion recessionary trends...