As opposed to many other school inputs, textbooks have frequently been demonstrated to significantly foster student achievement. Using the rich data set provided by the 'Program on the Analysis of Education Systems' (PASEC) for five francophone, sub-Saharan African countries, this paper goes...

In this paper we analyse the employment implications of firing restrictions. We find that when a recession is expected and the trend rate of productivity growth is small, a rise in firing costs affects mainly the hiring decision. Thus there is a negative effect on average employment. When, on...

Compared to other Western European countries, Germany was less successful in attracting FDI in the 1990s. The falling behind in inward-FDI should be no problem if foreign-owned firms (FoFs) were only substitutes for indigenous firms. However, to the extent they differ significantly in terms of...

The aim of the paper is to develop a theoretical framework for analyzing regional adjustment processes after idiosyncratic shocks. The model builds on the macroeconomic approach with monopolistic competition on goods and labor markets. It is shown how interregional factor mobility affects...

This paper proposes a model of the US unemployment rate which accounts for both its asymmetry and its long memory. Our approach, based on the tests of Robinson (1994), introduces fractional integration and nonlinearities simultaneously into the same framework (unlike earlier studies employing a...

A firm monopsonistically hires labor from a pool containing both skilled and unskilled workers. The marginal value of a worker depends on the match between the job and the worker's skill level. Unskilled workers can have negative productivity if they are placed in a skilled job. The firm cannot...

Border regions are likely to play a critical role within the spatial dynamics initiated by the enlargement of the EU. This paper deals with the effects of integration on labour markets in border regions. Within the framework of different theoretical approaches, the effects of integration on...

Recent studies of border effects have focused on the intra-country and inter-country comparison of trade flows. It is found that borders have a negative impact on the size of cross-border trade. In order to estimate border effects on a regional level one needs not only data on inter-country but...

In this paper we find evidence that the new economic geography approach is able to describe and explain the spatial characteristics of an economy, in our case the German economy. Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by...

This paper analyses the potential employment effects of foreign direct investment in the Swiss services industry. First, the theoretical analysis considers the consequences on domestic employment resulting from the specific characteristics of services compared with those of industrial goods. It...