This study focuses on the employment effect of a hiring subsidy available to firms with less than 50 employees, granted in the context of the 2012 Spanish labour market reform. Exploiting the arbitrary firm size threshold using regression discontinuity design, estimates show on average 2...

This study examines the effect of the Everything But Arms (EBA) trade preferences regime on exports from African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to the European Union (EU). With this aim, an augmented gravity model is estimated for exports from the 79 ACP countries...

The studies summarised in this paper focus on the economic implications of euro area firms' participation in global value chains (GVCs). They show how, and to what extent, a large set of economic variables and inter-linkages have been affected by international production sharing. The core...

This study focuses primarily on trade preferences offered by the European Union (EU) and in particular on the Everything But Arms (EBA) trade preferences regime, which is targeted exclusively on least developed countries (LDCs). Using the gravity model, an estimation of the influence of the EBA...

Using micro-aggregated firm information for nine Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and data from input-output tables, we examine the role of Global Value Chains (GVCs) for technology diffusion across EU countries. Our empirical results provide support for a two-stage diffusion process...

We analyze the impact of the EU unilateral trade preferences on both the intensive and the extensive margin of trade. Using a tobit and probit estimation we find that the impact of unilateral trade preferences on both margins is strictly linked to the sector under analysis and to the type of...

We analyse the impact of relaxing rules of origin (ROOs) in a simple setting with heterogeneous firms that buy intermediate inputs from domestic and foreign sources. In particular, we consider the impact of switching from bilateral to diagonal cumulation when using preferences (instead of paying...

In particular, the ability to export on time is crucial to explain comparative advantage in intermediate goods. These findings underscore the importance of investing in infrastructure and fostering trade facilitation to boost a country's participation in production networks. Furthermore, we...

We investigate the role of corruption in the business environment in explaining the efficiency of within-sector production factor allocation across firms in nine Central and Eastern European countries in the period 2003-2012. Using a conditional convergence model, we find evidence of a positive...

We analyse the evolution of capital and labour (mis)allocation across firms in five euro-area countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) and eight main sectors of the economy during the period 2002-2012. Three key stylized facts emerge. First, in all countries with the exception of...