This Report analyses and compares a number of indicators related to the evolution of the competitive behaviour of firms in the Single Market, from 1999 to 2007, in a selected number of both manufacturing and services industries and eight EU countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Poland,...

We investigate the evolution of firms’ competitive behavior in the EU by studying the dynamics of firms’ price-cost margins (PCMs) across four countries (France, Italy, Poland and Sweden), in three manufacturing and three services industries for around 170,000 firms over the period...

We study the effect of import competition on workers’ mental distress. To this purpose, we source information on the mental health of British workers from the British Household Panel Survey, and combine it with measures of import competition in more than 100 industries over 2001-2007. We find...

The economic impact of an institutional transplant depends on the underlying cultural envi-ronment of the receiving country. This paper provides the first evidence that the positive effect of importing good institutions cancels out when the receiving territories are characterized by cultural...