This paper uses a threshold autoregressive (TAR) framework to assess the relative importance of structural breaks and asymmetric persistence in accounting for the post-war unemployment experience. In comparing unemployment patterns across time periods and countries, we take the US as a...

This study compares wage mobility in Portugal and the UK, replicating the work by Dickens (2000) and progressing to discuss the impact of differences in the institutional framework, which is more regulated and centralized in Portugal, with minimum wages, employment protection, and collective...

We investigate the determinants of the remarkable increase in intra-regional migrations since the 1980’s in Spain, using a large administrative micro dataset on migrants. Conditional migration probabilities are identified by comparing the migrants’ joint distribution of characteristics to...

In this Paper, we discuss the main characteristics of European mandatory pension systems and the implications for these systems of increasing factor mobility. In particular, we expect the extent of redistribution (both intra- and intergenerational) in national pension systems to decrease. The...

This paper explores the two common concepts of the natural rate of unemployment: (i) the stable, long-run equilibrium rate of unemployment; and (ii) the equilibrium unemployment rate at which there is no tendency for this rate to change, given the exogenous variables. The first concept (common...

Since the 1970s Britain has gone from being a country of net emigration to one of net immigration, with a trend increase in immigration of more than 100,000 per year. This Paper represents the first attempt to model the variations in net migration for British and for foreign citizens, across...

Democratic countries with substantial inequality and where people believe that success depends on connections and luck induce political support for high tax rates and generous welfare states. Traditional wisdom is that such policies harm the economy, but there is not much evidence that countries...

Why do low-skilled workers choose to work in a foreign economy and what determines their wages? The Paper empirically implements the Roy self-selection model to study this question. It does so using a unique dataset on Palestinian workers working locally and in the Israeli economy. The data...

Early studies of business cycles argued that contractions in economic activity were briefer (shorter) and more violent (rapid) than expansions. This paper systematically investigates this claim and in the process discovers a robust new business cycle fact: expansions and contractions in output...

Despite the impression of Eurosclerosis, labour markets in Europe are in fact quite active. Flows into and out of unemployment are large, countercyclical, and highly coincident in the four European countries examined in this paper. The most surprising finding is that exits from unemployment...