This paper presents new estimates of the economic benefits from economic and political integration. Using the synthetic counterfactuals method, we estimate how GDP per capita and labour productivity would have behaved for the countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the 1973, 1980s, 1995...

During the crisis, support for the EU has declined noticeably in many European Union member states. While previous research on European public opinion has mainly focused on the impact of domestic country- and individual-level factors on public attitudes towards the EU, this paper argues that...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. Such fairness considerations have been introduced in political economy and optimal income tax models with a...

This paper assesses empirically the effects of oil price shocks on the real economic activity of the main industrialised countries. Multivariate VAR analysis is carried out using both linear and nonlinear models. The latter category includes three approaches employed in the literature, namely,...

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....

This paper examines the impact of performance-related pay on wage differentials within firms. Our theoretical framework predicts that, compared to a fixed pay system, pay schemes based on individual output increase within-firm wage inequality, while group-based bonuses have minor effects on wage...

In a growth accounting context one usually constructs a quality adjusted index of labor services by aggregating over predefined groups of workers, using the groups' relative wage bills as weights. In this article we suggest a method based on decomposing individual predicted wages into a...

We present comparable evidence on intergenerational earnings mobility for Denmark, Finland, Norway, the UK and the US, with a focus on the role of gender and marital status. We confirm that earnings mobility in the Nordic countries is typically greater than in the US and in the UK, but find...

We address the impact of education upon wage inequality by drawing on evidence from fifteen European countries, during a period ranging between 1980 and 1995. We focus on within-educational-levels wage inequality by estimating quantile regressions of Mincer equations and analysing the...

In 30% of young American couples the wife is more educated than the husband. Those women are characterized by a substantially higher employment (all else equal), which in turn amplifies income inequality across couples. Using NLSY79, we formulate and structurally estimate a dynamic life-cycle...