The absence of evidence in the scholarly literature for a tested long-term relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth is at odds with the importance attributed to entrepreneurship in the policy arena. The present paper addresses this absence, introducing entrepreneurship using four different and accepted models explaining the total factor productivity of twenty OECD countries with data for the period 1969-2010. Traditionally, entrepreneurship is not addressed in these models. We show that in all modelsas well as a joint one-entrepreneurship has a significant influence while the remaining effects largely stay the same. Entrepreneurship is measured as the business ownership rate (number of business owners per workforce) corrected for the level of economic development (GDP per capita).Keywords Total factor productivity Á Entrepreneurship Á Research and development Á OECD JEL Classification E20 Á L26 Á M13 Á O30 Á O40 Á O50

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Research and development (R&D) is important for economic growth. Many countries therefore attempt to raise the investments in R&D. Increasingly important in this context are foreign direct investments in R&D, which on average constitute 24% of total business R&D investments in the EU15 (between 1995 and 2004). This paper focuses on the question: 'Which location factors are decisive for the attractiveness of foreign R&D investments?' The answer to this question is crucial in order to attract new foreign investments in R&D and to keep home-base R&D activities in a country or to expand them. Based on econometric analysis, we show in this paper that, besides the impact of human capital and value added of foreign affiliates, a country's stock of private R&D capital is an important location factor for international R&D activities. The interpretation of this result is twofold. First of all, it indicates that firms locate their R&D abroad to reap the benefits of knowledge-spillover effects. Secondly, we argue that the stock of private R&D capital embodies a so-called 'place-to-be effect'. This effect can be regarded as a signalling effect to firms: if the private R&D capital stock in a country is relatively large, framework conditions for research are in place and the innovative climate is likely to be excellent.internationalization of R&D, R&D location factors, R&D investment climate, foreign direct investment,

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We analyse the costs of Brexit. The results show that by 2030 a hard Brexit would reduce cumulative GDP growth by 18 percentage points compared to a situation where the UK continued its EU membership. The economic damage in our FTA and soft Brexit scenarios is less severe than in our hard Brexit scenario, although it will still cost the UK economy roughly 12.5 percentage points and 10 percentage points of cumulative GDP growth by 2030, respectively. We find much larger negative effects than most existing studies that use macroeconometric modelling to assess the effects of Brexit. This is due to two reasons. First, we use an improved tariff version of the macroeconometric model NiGEM, which enables us better to assess the negative impact of cost-push inflation resulting from imposed trade barriers. Second, we estimate a new productivity model for the UK, which allows us to gauge adequately the negative UK-specific effects on productivity caused by Brexit.

We study if labour market mismatch has increased in the Netherlands during the Great Recession. First, we estimate a so-called "steady-state" Beveridge curve based on labour market flows. An outward shift of this curve implies decreasing matching efficiency. Second, we construct a mismatch index which enables us to calculate the contribution of sector mismatch to the increase in unemployment. Our analyses show little support for the hypothesis that mismatch is currently a significant problem for the Dutch labour market. At the aggregate level, the Beveridge curve has not shifted outwards. In addition, at most one-ninth of the Dutch unemployment rise can be attributed to sector mismatch, which is comparable to the contribution during the previous downturn.

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