Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number ofresearchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills incities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result,however, is that...

Starting from Professor Kornai´s assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-termperspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performanceof the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. Wepresent in a simple form the...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkablywell in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simplerank-size rule known as Zipf´s law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is thechurning of industries...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...

Whether people of differing types can live happily together is one of the most important social and political questions concerning urban areas. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, such mixing seems extremely unlikely. While the theoretical result seems well supported in the context of...

The principal means by which individuals and families achieve economic self-sufficiency is through labor market earnings. As a consequence, it is natural for policy makers to look to interventions that increase the ability of individuals and families to achieve an adequate standard of living...

What are the performance benefits of investing in human resources in a low-cost laborenvironment where returns to such investment are widely perceived as negligible? This paperpresents a matched pair case study on the performance effect of human resourcemanagement systems at two garment...

This paper employs United States Census data to study the occupational allocation ofimmigrants. The data reveal that the occupational shares of various ethnic groups havegrown drastically in regional labor markets over the period 1980 to 2000. We examine theextent to which this growth can be...

Econometric evaluations of public-sponsored training programmes generally find littleevidence of an impact of such policies on transition rates out of unemployment. We performthe first evaluation of training effects for the unemployed adults in France, exploiting a uniquelongitudinal dataset...

The EU experience with youth unemployment has changed over recent years with the launchand re-launch of the Lisbon Strategy and the Bologna process. A dramatic shift has takenplace from the 1990s emphasis on labour market flexibility as a tool to abate youth long termunemployment to the more...