People flows refers to the movement of people across international borders in the form of immigration, international student flows, business travel, and tourism. Despite its peripheral status in debates over globalization, the movement of people from low income to high income countries is...

The distribution of earnings and the distribution of skills vary widely among advanced countries, with the major English-speaking countries, the US, UK, and Canada, having much greater inequality in both earnings and skills than continental European Union countries. This raises the possibility...

The paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned about the effects of these institutions on economic outcomes. It identifies...

This paper estimates the effect of changing union density on earnings differentials and inequality among male workers in the U.S. and on industry earnings differentials among OECD countries. For the U.S. the evidence indicates that the fall in union density contributed to the 1980s increase in...

Greater job creation in the US than in Germany has often been related to greater wage dispersion coupled with less regulated labour and product markets in the US. Based on the Comparative German American Structural Database and the International Adult Literacy Survey we find that employment of...

Firms hire workers to undertake tasks and activities associated with particular occupations, which makes occupations a fundamental unit in economic analyses of the labor market. Using a unique set of data on pay in identically defined occupations in developing and advanced countries, we find...

Workers have responded differently to declining union density in the US and UK. US workers have unfilled demand for unions whereas many UK workers free-ride at unionized workplaces. To explain this difference, we create a scalar measure of worker needs for representation and relate desire for...

Women work much more in the US than in Germany and most other EU economies. We find that the US-German employment gap is not strongly related to cross-country differences in the level of pay or social benefits. The difference in employment is due to the different marketization of activities...

This study transforms the October Inquiry' Survey of wages conducted by the International Labour Organization into a consistent data file on pay in 161 occupations in over 150 countries from 1983 to 1998 to examine the pattern of pay across occupations and countries. The new file tells us that:...