In this paper we analyse the underlying causes behind Spanish unemployment which is now at 24%. We interpret this unfortunate outcome as the result of a series of adverse shocks, compounded by disinflationary policies and by a flawed system of labour market institutions. Our aim is to explain...

This study is the first to provide a systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of...

In traditional Keynesian and neoclassical models, the transmission of product demand changes to the labour market generally involves wage-price sluggishness or counter-cyclical real wage movements. In practice, however, real wages are often acyclical or procyclical, and wages and prices are...

This paper presents a wage series for unskilled English women workers from 1260 to 1850 and compares it with existing evidence for men. Our series cast light on long run trends in women’s agency and wellbeing, revealing an intractable, indeed widening gap between women and men’s remuneration...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this paper analyses the effects of spending part of adolescents’ leisure time on playing music or doing sports, or both. We find that while playing music fosters educational outcomes compared to doing sports, particularly so for girls and...

This microeconometric study analyzes the effects of individual leisure sports participation on long-term labour market variables, on socio-demographic as well as on health and subjective well-being indicators for West Germany based on individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study...

Improving accountability in public services has been a central objective of many public sector reforms in recent years. Chief among these have been efforts to generate observable performance measures as a basis for monitoring performance. This paper examines a natural experiment in regimes...

We estimate the effect of binge drinking on accident and emergency attendances, road accidents, arrests, and the number of police officers on duty using a variety of unique data from Britain and a two-sample minimum distance estimation procedure. Our estimates, which reveal sizeable effects of...

Mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals are investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Our results show that innovative procedures play a key role in explaining the effect of ownership status...

Crime has been argued to have important externalities. We investigate the relationship between violent crime and an important type of behaviour: individuals’ participation in their local area through walking and physical activity. We use a sample of nearly 1 million people residing in over 320...