Given a general belief that jobs last longer in tightly regulated labour markets, the presumption would be that jobs last longer in Italy than they do in Britain. We use two large micro datasets to address this issue. Surprisingly, we find a higher proportion of male workers in Britain than in...

We investigate whether an aging population may challenge the supremacy of large working-cities. To this end, we develop an economic geography model with two types of individuals (workers and retirees) and two sectors (local services and manufacturing). Workers produce and consume; the elderly...

We consider an economic geography model in which all firms and workers are mobile, but the agglomeration of firms and workers within a region generates urban costs. We show that industries with high transport costs tend to be more agglomerated than industries with low transport costs. This is to...

Instrumental variable estimation requires untestable exclusion restrictions. With policy effects on individual outcomes, there is typically a time interval between the moment the agent realizes that he may be exposed to the policy and the actual exposure or the announcement of the actual...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the individual earnings capacity is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital. Estimating these effects is complicated because earnings are observed for employed individuals only, and employment...

This paper studies the causal effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland is a multilingual country that hosts four official language groups of which three are major (French, German, and Italian). These groups of native language speakers are geographically...

This paper is concerned with the influence of agglomeration economies on economic outcomes across British regions. The concentration of economic activity in one place can foster economic performance due to the reduction in transportation costs, the ready availability of customers and suppliers,...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset of firms and workers to investigate the relationship between the firm’s lifecycle and the reallocation of labour. We distinguish labour reallocation associated with job reallocation, and reallocation of workers over a fixed configuration of jobs. We find...

Conventional methods for analysing worker flows often focus on gross flows or transition probabilities. This is not necessarily informative for identifying the scale of labour ‘adjustment’ in an economy in the sense of the expansion and decline of industries. We develop a method that relates...