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...

How does technical progress affect long-term unemployment? The relationship between long-term unemployment and the rate of growth attributable to technical progress is evaluated in a growth-matching-model with heterogeneous jobless workers and with endogenously determined long-term unemployed...

This paper explores the international economic effects of forced labour, namely the linkages of forced labour with comparative advantage (trade) and foreign direct investment flows. It discusses several forms and the prevalence of forced labour and presents the results of empirical tests of...

This paper uses a large plant level panel data set from Germany and a matching approach to look for causal effects of starting to export on plant performance. We find positive effects on growth of employment, labor productivity, and wages. Dieses Diskussionspapier untersucht, welche Effekte der...

Regional unemployment rates in the European Union (EU-15) reveal a core-periphery structure. Large "core" regions in the middle of the continent have low unemployment rates, whereas excessive mass unemployment is predominantly found in the peripheral regions at the outside borders of EU-15. This...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

This paper uses a dataset on the foreign activities by Swedish manufacturing firms to examine the performance of German affiliates compared with affiliates in other locations. It is found that German affiliates, on average, have higher labour productivity, R&D expenditure per employee and...