Existing unemployment insurance systems in many OECD countries involve a ceiling on insurable earnings. The result is lower replacement rate for employees with relatively high earnings. This paper examines whether replacement rates should decrease as the level of earnings rises. The framework is...

How do labour market policies influence employment's responsiveness to output fluctuations (employment-output elasticity)? We revisit this question on a panel of OECD countries, which also incorporates the period of the Great Recession. We distinguish between passive and active labour market...

Health and longevity have increased substantially over the last 50 years, yet the labor force participation of older men has declined in most developed countries. We use mortality as a measure of health to assess the capacity to work at older ages in 12 OECD countries. For a given level of...

This econometric analysis investigates the impact of changes in sectoral valueadded prices and total factor productivity (TFP) on the equilibrium relative wage of low-skilled workers in eleven high-income countries. The key finding is that TFP growth mandated an increase in the unskilled wage,...

Recreation prices and hours worked have both fallen over the last century. We construct a macroeconomic model with general preferences that allows for trending recreation prices, wages, and work hours along a balanced-growth path. Estimating the model using aggregate data from OECD countries, we...

Our paper makes a first attempt to address the impact of skills and skill use in the analysis of the gender wage gap using the PIAAC dataset. Using the case of Austria, we show that skill use as well as the skill match play an important role with regard to wage regressions of men as well as...

Demand for less skilled workers decreased dramatically in the US and in other developed countries over the past two decades. We argue that pervasive skill-biased technological change rather than increased trade with the developing world is the principal culprit. The pervasiveness of this...