With increasing globalisation of knowledge, there are increased opportunities to 'learn' from the experience ofpolicy interventions elsewhere. This paper presents evidence on the extent of international convergence inpublic policy, with particular focus on labour, welfare, savings and retirement...

It has been suggested in the literature that taxes and subsidies play an important role in explaining the differences in working hours across countries. In this paper I test whether public programmes for family support play a role in explaining this variation. I analyse two types of policies:...

We examine the distribution of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities when sectors are divided into three groups: one that produces goods without home substitutes and two others that have home substitutes — health and social work, and all others....

While acknowledging the importance of fairness and the need to avoid creating disincentives in the design of tax reform, the Henry Review recommends a simplified Personal Income Tax and child payments withdrawn on a single family income test. This paper shows that the proposed reforms would...

The supply of formal childcare has expanded in many developed countries. There is ambiguity, however, in the theory that the entry of care providers increases consumers’ surplus and the welfare of households in a market with differentiated services, such as childcare. This study empirically...

This paper brings new evidence on the relationship between employees' well being, sickness absence and four dimensions of workplace performance i.e. productivity, efficiency, quality of service and profitability. It uses a new panel dataset with monthly observations over two years for 48 local...

I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Computations show that the very low unemployment in Europe in the 1960s was...

Mexican migration to the United States has been a very important issue throughout the twentieth century, and its relevance has reached unprecedented levels during the last two decades. Even though there is a huge body of literature that analyses many different aspects of this phenomenon, the...

This paper analyses the increase in mothers¿ employment in Britain over the period 1974¿2000. The approach consists of isolating those birth cohorts whose mothers experienced significant increases in employment and relating those to changes in policies (maternity rights, taxation and...

We examine the implications of tax and subsidy policies for employment in the "three worlds of welfare", Anglo-Saxon, Continental European and Scandinavian. We argue that home production is key to a proper evaluation of the employment outcomes. Anglo-Saxon low-support policies encourage more...