This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

This paper estimates the economic returns to education in China from 1989 to 2009, using the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) dataset. We find that education returns for one additional year generally increase from 2.6% in 1989 to 7.9% in 2009. Education returns, however, may reflect...

This Paper explores the influence of on-the-job training on the employment effect of firing costs. It shows that on-the-job training (generating firm specific skills) causes firing costs to have a contractionary influence on average employment (over the booms and recessions of the business cycle).

The paper examines the employment and unemployment implications of permitting unemployed people to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. This opportunity to transfer unemployment benefits, `benefit transfers', would help replace the...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...

The paper analyses the contemporary organizational restructuring of production and work and derives some salient implications for the labour market. The analysis focuses on the switch from occupational specialization at 'Tayloristic' organizations to multi-tasking at 'holistic' organizations....

This paper investigates the impact of training and education on productivity, in particular linking to a literature that emphasizes the need to reorganise production following adoption of ICT. The paper examines training at the total economy level and variation across industries, focusing...

This paper presents new data series designed to yield a more complete picture of the growth in average skill levels embedded in the EU workforce, comparing with competitor countries such as the US and China. Harmonised data from EU surveys are employed to extend coverage in existing databases to...

This paper examines the effect of shifts in the relative supply and demand of skills on the skill premiums and wage inequality in the British labour market 1972-2002. We test the Katz and Murphy (1992) hypothesis that the changes of skill premiums can be explained by their relative supply...