We argue that societies with a stronger tendency towards postmaterialist life goals tilt the tax structure towards personal income taxes and away from corporate taxation. We provide empirical evidence for this correlation in OECD countries. To address endogeneity issues we then use an...

This paper analyses the influence of the capital market on the labour market. Especially the impact of start-up financing on the structure of unemployment is of interest. We use a cross-country panel data analysis to examine how venture capital investment influences disaggre-gate unemployment....

Using firm-level data from France, we document that the shift of economic activity from manufacturing to services over the last few decades has been urban-biased: structural change has been more pronounced in areas with higher population density. This bias can be accounted for by the location...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. Developing countries are currently making huge investments in electrification, with a view to achieving structural change. What does history say about its impact on the structure of employment? We...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

U.S. state-level banking deregulation during the 1980’s mitigated the impact of the China trade shock (CTS) on local economies (states and commuting zones) a decade later, in the 1990s. Local economies, where local banking markets opened up earlier, were also effectively financially more...

Average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. We document this fact for thirteen countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia). We develop a measure of human capital that accounts for the selection of workers with different unobserved...

Even before the Great Recession, U.S. employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable employment gains achieved during the 1990s, with a historic contraction in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. We estimate that...

In this paper we develop a multi-sector model of firms pricing behaviour under imperfect competition. We allow for the fact that some goods sold will be for final consumption, while others will be used as intermediate goods in further production. We assume that price setters are constrained by...

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...