One of the most obvious consequences of a monetary union is that monetary policy is lost as an instrument of national macroeconomic policy. The loss of the exchange rate as a national policy instrument has important implications for macroeconomic stability in the presence of asymmetric shocks,...

This paper investigates the role of institutions for labour market performance across European countries. As participation rates have been rather stable over the past, the unemployment problem is mainly caused by shortages in labour demand. Labour demand is expressed by its structural...

In a big amount of economies (NUTS-I) the evolution of manufacturing production is analysed using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross Added Value (GAV) data from National Accounts. In Spain, the problem of using these data is that they are not available as soon as it would be desirable. In...

Using microdata, we analyse the determinants of firm relocation and outsourcing decisions and their effects on firms' employment decisions. The results for a sample of 32 countries show that both strategies have been more intense in the EU-15 countries than in the rest and that, in some cases,...

The existing literature on immigrant assimilation has highlighted the imperfect portability of human capital acquired by immigrants in their country of origin (Chiswick, 1978; Friedberg, 2000). This would explain the low levels of assimilation upon arrival in the new country, as well as the wide...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role played by the different components of human capital in the wage determination of recent immigrants within the Spanish labour market. Using microdata from the Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes 2007, the paper examines returns to human capital of...

This paper analyses the differential impact of human capital, in terms of different levels of schooling, on regional productivity and convergence. The potential existence of geographical spillovers of human capital is also considered by applying spatial panel data techniques. The empirical...