The recent EU expansion raised fears of potential migration motivated by welfare receipt. In this paper we use comparable data from five countries - Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Norway and the U.S. - to ask whether immigrants benefit more from social support than natives. Looking at the European...

This paper attempts to bridge the gap between previous cross-national work estimating rates of return to education and the current trend toward examining rates over time. Changes in the returns to education in the 1980s over five countries were driven by different forces across the countries.

In this paper we deliver first causal evidence on the relationship between immigrant host country language proficiency and homeownership. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we find a substantial positive impact of language skills on the propensity to own a home and the quality of housing....

This paper uses cross-nationally comparable data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to analyze the patterns and consequences of part-time employment among women across five industrialized countries - Canada, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States - as of the middle 1990s....

Within the OECD, there are significant differences in the trend and level of average work hours. [For example, from 1980 to 2000, average working hours per adult (ages 15-64) rose by 234 hours in the USA to 1476 while falling by 170 hours in Germany, to 973]. Since these trends appear to be...

The US labour market is characterized by a high skill wage mark-up and low unemployment, while the German labour market has a low skill wage mark-up and a high, mainly unskilled unemployment rate. This paper adds an innovative labour supply explanation to the discussion how these distinct labour...

We utilise repeated cross sections of micro data from several countries, available from the Luxembourg Income Study, LIS, to estimate labour supply elasticities, both at the intensive and extensive margin. The benefit of the data is that it spans over four decades and includes a large number of...

This study compares the receipt rates of unemployment compensation of American young men (aged 18-25) with those from Canada and the United Kingdom. The results indicate that American young men are far less likely to receive compensation for their unemployment than are youth from the other two...