Investment in Eastern Europe: The role of multilateral organisations

Director and Chief Economist, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America, European Investment Bank.     

Stil und Ordnung des europäischen Wirtschaftsraumes

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Messung und Klassifikation destechnischen Fortschritts Eine Antwort an A. Heertje

Ohne ZusammenfassungA. Heertje: Zur Ottschen Klassifikation des technischen Fortschritts. In dieser Zeitschrift, S. 227 f.     

REFERENCE NORMS,STAGGERED WAGES,AND WAGE LEADERSHIP: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE*

This article presents an extension of the Taylor model with staggered wages in which wage setting is also influenced by reference norms. We show that reference norms can considerably increase the persistence of inflation but that the size of this effect depends on the exact definition (e.g., external vs. internal, symmetric vs. asymmetric norms). Using data on collectively bargained wages in Austria from 1980 to 2006 we show that wage setting is strongly influenced by reference norms, that external norms seem to matter more than internal norms, and that there is a clear indication for the existence of wage leadership (asymmetric norms).     

Generalized Progress of Abatement Technology: Incentives Under Environmental Liability Law

This paper considers the incentives environmental liability creates to improve pollution abatement technology. Our analysis considers technical progress in end-of-pipe abatement and in the production technology used, thereby generalizing the approach taken by Endres et?al. (Environ Resour Econ 36:341?C366, 2007). We establish that this generalization has drastic repercussions on incentives under negligence liability, while the performance of strict liability is not compromised. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the social desirability of investment in abatement or production technology (or both) decisively determines how ex-ante and ex-post regulation fare with respect to welfare maximization in the case of negligence liability.     

The Non-Trivial Choice between Innovation Indicators

We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of five alternative innovation indicators: R&D, patent applications, total innovation expenditure and shares in sales taken by imitative and by innovative products as they were measured in the 1992 Community Innovation Survey (CIS) in the Netherlands. We conclude that the two most commonly used indicators (R&D and patent applications) have more (and more severe) weaknesses than is often assumed. Moreover, our factor analysis suggests that there is little correlation between the various indicators. This underlines the empirical relevance of various sources of bias of innovation indicators as discussed in this paper.     

How ongoing structural change creates a double dividend: outdating of technologies and green growth

Portuguese Economic Journal - In this paper we study how the ongoing transition to newer technologies, what we refer to as dynamic structural change, in a doubly-differentiated R&D-based...     

Human capital formation,learning by doing and the government in the process of economic growth

We present an endogenous growth model with human capital and learning by doing. Human capital is not an input factor in the production process of final output but it affects the ability to build up knowledge capital as a by‐product of cumulated investment (learning by doing). Human capital is formed in the schooling sector that is financed by the government. The government may run into debt but obeys the inter‐temporal budget constraint. The article analyzes the structure of the model and studies the effects of different budgetary policies as regards the balanced growth rate, transition dynamics and with respect to welfare.