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Employees of globalized firms face a riskier menu of labor market outcomes. They face a more uncertain stream of earnings and riskier employment prospects. However, they may also have stronger incentives to train and upgrade their skills and/or may benefit from more rapid careers. Hence, the costs of uncertainty and the benefits of skill upgrading associated with globalization may be twin to each other. We provide statistical evidence of this so far neglected trade-off for a sample of Indian manufacturing firms.

We investigate the role of workers' and managerial experience as a determinant of firm innovation and productivity in a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. A high share of temporary - thus un-experienced - workers is associated to low innovation and productivity. The effect of managerial experience measured by age on firm performance depends instead on the type of firm: high age of managers and board members is bad for innovation and productivity growth, while costs and benefits of old managerial age cancel out for non-innovative firms.

We study the relation between the off-shoring of intermediates and services and productivity growth in the Italian manufacturing industries in 1995-2003. Our results indicate that the off-shoring of intermediates within the same industry (“narrow off-shoring”) is beneficial for productivity growth, while the off-shoring of services is not. We also find that the way in which off-shoring is measured may matter considerably. The positive relation between off-shoring of intermediates and productivity growth is there with our direct measures based on input-output data but disappears when either a broad measure or the Feenstra-Hanson off-shoring measure employed in other studies are used instead.

Is the process of workforce aging a burden or a blessing for the firm? Our paper seeks to answer this question by providing evidence on the age-productivity and age-earnings profiles for a sample of plants in three manufacturing industries (“forest”, “industrial machinery” and “electronics”) in Finland. Our main result is that exposure to rapid technological and managerial changes does make a difference for plant productivity, less so for wages. In electronics, the Finnish industry undergoing a major technological and managerial shock in the 1990s, the response of productivity to age-related variables is first sizably positive and then becomes sizably negative as one looks at plants with higher average seniority and experience. This declining part of the curve is not there either for the forest industry or for industrial machinery. It is not there either for wages in electronics. These conclusions survive when a host of other plausible productivity determinants (notably, education and plant vintage) are included in the analysis. We conclude that workforce aging may be a burden for firms in high-tech industries and less so in other industries.

\'Globalized\' workers enjoy a riskier, but potentially more rewarding, menu of labor market outcomes. This, so far overlooked, feature of globalization is documented here for a sample of Indian manufacturing Þrms. Firms subject to external exposure, be they exporting, import-competing or foreign-owned, indeed face higher earnings variability and job insecurity. At the same time, though, the employees of foreign-owned and import-competing firms are more frequently involved in training programs than employees of Þrms not subject to foreign competition. Similarly, the employees of exporting firms are promoted more frequently than otherwise. The \'bad\' and the \'good\' labormarket effects of globalization are thus twin to each other. Concentrating on just one side of the coin gives a misleading picture of globalization.

While the return to growth in the US is largely credited to the rapid spreading of information technology, a key policy concern everywhere, and notably in Europe, is whether and when the US economic boom will extend abroad, and what role new technologies are about to play. In this paper, I collect and supplement data on the extent and the contribution to growth of ‘new economy’ activities in Europe, and in a sample of OECD countries at large, in the 1990s. Available evidence indicates that capital accumulation in information technologies did make a contribution to growth in the EU too, though not equally everywhere. The contribution of new technologies was substantial in the UK and the Netherlands, and rapidly increasing over time in Finland, Ireland and Denmark. These were also the fast EU growing countries in the 1990s. New technologies contributed less in France, Germany, Belgium and Sweden, and marginally in Italy and Spain. Most of these countries were also ‘slow growers’. I conclude that the growth gaps between the EU and the US, as well as within the EU, can (also) be associated to the diverse pace of adoption of new technologies across countries.

As part of their effort to pool individual risk, households consider spreading their members over a plurality of locations, both inside and outside their country of origin. At the same time, the world is ridden with ‘Chinatowns’ and ‘Little Italies’: people, whenever they move, tend to bunch in the same location. Bunching would appear fundamentally at odds with the desire to diversify risk. In this paper we provide a framework to reconcile both spatial bunching and the spread of migrants, combining risk-aversion and concavity of mobility costs at the household level. Evidence from Southern Italy is consistent with the main predictions from our model.

Reform is often flawed by delayed implementation and, after initial acceptance, sudden reversals in public reaction. In recent years, many attribute these delays and reversals to reform dynamics because reform, particularly when comprehensive, rarely takes place all at once. In designing reform, it is important to determine what the best sequencing of reform would be, under what conditions that sequence is feasible, and how expectations will affect the success of alternative reform strategies. In the literature on second-best reform strategies, misperceptions about the prospective costs and benefits of reform add another intertemporal distortion to the many already identified. Bold moves, such as pre-announced institutional changes, are often suggested as a way to signal the beginning of a new policy regime. The author advocates a more cautious approach when a government has been discredited by a history of policy failures.