This paper describes and explains some of the principal trends in the wage and skill distribution in recent decades. There have been sharp increases in wage inequality across the OECD, beginning with the US and UK at the end of the 1970s. A good fraction of this inequality growth is due to...

This paper develops a theory of technology transfer when technology is embodied in human capital and learning requires on-the-job communication between managers and workers. Patterns of knowledge diffusion depend on where high knowledge managers work and how much time they allocate to training...

Guy Michaels and colleagues show how new technologies are polarising the labour market, with the middle-skilled losing out most

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases...

What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be costly in the long run, due to economic or political reasons. I examine this...

OECD labor markets have become more "polarized" with employment in the middle of the skill distribution falling relative to the top and (in recent years) also the bottom of the skill distribution. We test the hypothesis of Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) that this is partly due to information...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers' convergence could therefore...

John Van Reenen sketches the evolution of CEP research on the drivers of productivity growth - and its impact on policies to foster competition.

Using US firm level panel data we simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three potential sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technological, and product market ("horizontal"). To do so, we construct new measures of geographic proximity based on the...

How does a major financial network innovation influence firm performance? Despite much speculation we have little hard quantitative evidence about the impact of technology diffusion in financial services. In this paper we use the entire adoption history for SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide...