Higher inequality reduces capital accumulation and increases the informal economy, which creates additional employment opportunities for low-skilled and deprived people. Despite this positive feedback, informality raises problems for public finances and biases official statistics, reducing the...

The occupational skill structure depends on the business cycle if employers respond to shortages of applicants during upturns by lowering their hiring standards. Devereux uses this implication to construct empirical tests for the notion of hiring standards adjustment (the so-called Reder...

The UK national minimum wage (NMW) is age-specific with the most important threshold at the age of 22 (lowered to 21 from 2010 onwards) when workers become eligible for the adult rate. The authors estimate the impact of this threshold on employment by means of a regression discontinuity...

In this paper, the authors empirically investigate the relationship between energy consumption and the size of the informal economy. Relying on panel data regression models, their results show that at the aggregate level, energy intensity is inversely related to the size of the informal sector,...

About one in five workers across OECD countries is employed part-time, and the share has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis in 2007. Part-time options play an important economic role by providing more flexible working arrangements for both workers...

In Europe, about one in eight people of working age report having a disability; that is, the presence of a long-term limiting health condition. Despite the introduction of a range of legislative and policy initiatives designed to eliminate discrimination and facilitate retention of and entry...

The causal effect of globalization on income inequality is an issue of significant academic interest. On one hand globalization is considered to promote global economic growth and social progress, while on the other, it is blamed for growing income inequality and environmental degradation,...

This article aims to expand existing empirical knowledge on the impact of debt level on profitability of companies. We analyze a sample of an unbalanced panel of 2325 unlisted French companies of trade sector spanning over a period of 1999 to 2006. By using the generalized method of moments...

This study uses Monte Carlo experiments to produce new evidence on the performance of a wide range of panel data estimators. It focuses on estimators that are readily available in statistical software packages such as Stata and Eviews, and for which the number of cross-sectional units (N) and...