This paper examines the evidence that rapid upgrading of the skill structure in recent years was driven by technological change. Four countries are examined who have had different wage inequality and unemployment trends – Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analysis...

This paper investigates the impact of innovation on employment using a panel of UK manufacturing firms and a headcount measure of innovations. It focuses on unionized firms and outlines a methodology for testing between various types of union bargaining models. It also argues that the innovation...

This Paper surveys the economic literature on the impact of trade unions on innovation. There are many theoretical routes through which unions may have an effect on innovation, for example through their effects on relative factor prices, profitability and their attitudes towards the introduction...

This paper examines the impact of technological innovation on wages using a panel of UK manufacturing firms. We utilize a headcount measure of major innovations between 1945-83 combined with share price and accounting information. Innovating firms are found to have higher average wages, but...

Nominal price and wage rigidity renders monetary policy effective over output. However, this effectiveness extends, under widely used overlapping-wage and Calvo-contract Phillips Curves, to planned monetary policy (‘exploitability’) and not merely to policy surprises. We argue that within...

The paper surveys recent analyses of rising unemployment in Europe based on the concept of the natural rate. It argues that there is a continuity of analysis from the classics through Keynes to these more recent approaches. Theories of efficiency wages, hysteresis, and insiders/outsiders are...

We log-linearise the Dellas and Tavlas (DT) model of monetary union and solve it analytically. We find that the intuition of optimal currency analysis of DT's second generation open economy model is essentially the same as that of first generation models. Monetary union results in no welfare...