The past two decades have seen substantial deregulation in the financial sectors of most OECD countries. The main motivation was to improve efficiency within the financial system, but the macroeconomic implications might go beyond this objective with impacts on the business cycle and the...

Problems of unemployment and low pay amongst the low-skilled and those with little work experience are severe in many OECD countries. Employment-conditional schemes are policy instruments designed to increase the employment prospects of the low-skilled as well as to support their living...

This study examines the dynamics of poverty for four OECD countries (Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States). It provides information on patterns of poverty, which groups stay in poverty the longest, and household/individual characteristics and life-course events which appear...

This paper presents a new data set on the number of enterprises, employees, gross output and value added in manufacturing by size category. The figures are obtained from censuses of manufactures and industrial surveys for three years (one year in the 1960s, one year in the 1970s, and one year in...

This paper is one of four in this Working Paper series, focusing on financial liberalisation, along with those by Miller and Weller, Driscoll, and Blundell-Wignall and Browne. It examines the historical volatilities of stock, bond and foreign currency markets over alternative periods differing...