The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the ‘classics’, however (Fisher (1935),...

Europeans have worked less than Americans since the 1970s. In this paper, we quantify the relative importance of the extensive and intensive margins of aggregate hours of market work on the observed differences. Our counterfactual exercises show that the two dimensions of the extensive margin,...

Since 1960, the dynamics of the aggregate hours of market work exhibit dramatic differences across industrialized countries. Before 1980, these differences seem to come from the hours worked per employee (the intensive margin). However, since 1980 a notable feature of the data is that the...

This paper analyzes the regional variation of minimum wage in China. We first introduce the institutional background of China's minimum wage policy, and then describe the regional variation of the minimum wages using detailed minimum wage data since the late 1990s. Large regional variation...

We document the recent phenomenon of "uphill" flows of capital from nonindustrial to industrial countries and analyze whether this pattern of capital flows has hurt growth in nonindustrial economies that export capital. Surprisingly, we find that there is a positive correlation between current...

France posted remarkable gains in employment in the second half of the 1990s, suggesting that, beyond cyclical factors, structural unemployment may have changed in the period. We provide a novel methodology to separate structural from cyclical labor market changes and apply it to French...

In 1990 Colombia replaced its traditional system of severance payments with a new system of severance payments savings accounts (SPSAs). Although severance payments often are justified on the grounds that they provide insurance against earnings loss, they also increase costs for employers and...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, based on "frictional growth" describing the interplay between nominal frictions and money growth. When the money supply grows in the presence of price inertia (due to staggered wage contracts with time discounting), the...

The creeping stock market collapse eroded the wealth of funded pension systems. This led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of property rights on the pension funds wealth. We argue that this problem can best be resolved by the introduction of generational...

This paper shows that the interaction between money growth and staggered nominal contracts gives rise to a long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff.