Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

A regression kink design (RKD or RK design) can be used to identify casual effects in settings where the regressor of interest is a kinked function of an assignment variable. In this paper, we apply an RKD approach to study the effect of unemployment benefits on the duration of joblessness in...

We present quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of increasing the Early Retirement Age (ERA) on older workers' retirement decisions. The analysis is based on social security reforms in Austria in 2000 and 2004, and administrative data allows us to distinguish between pension claims and job...

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly...

We examine the role of the ICT revolution in driving productivity growth behavior for the United States and an aggregate of ten Western European nations (the EU-10) from 1977 to 2015. We find that the standard growth accounting approach is deficient when it separates sources of growth between...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

Throughout the postwar era until 1995 labor productivity grew faster in Europe than in the United States. Since 1995, productivity growth in the EU-15 has slowed while that in the United States has accelerated. But Europe's productivity growth slowdown was largely offset by faster growth in...

Starting from the same level of productivity and per-capita income as the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Europe fell behind steadily to a level of barely half in 1950, and then began a rapid catch-up. While Europe's level of productivity has almost converged, its income per person...

After fifty years of catching up to the United States level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity...

This paper studies the relationship between real wages and unernployment in Europe. It finds no evidence that high real wages are responsible for the differing behavior of unemployment in Europe as contrasted with the U. S., and across European countries finds patterns of real wage behavior that...