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...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region falls behind several other geo-economic regions in terms of women's participation rates in the labour market. This paper examines the implications of firm-related and national factors for Female Labour Force Participation (FLFP) rates in...

This paper explores the employment impact of innovation activity, taking into account both R&D expenditures and embodied technological change (ETC). We use a novel panel dataset covering 265 innovative Italian firms over the period 1998-2010. The main outcome from the proposed fixed effect...

Immigration, like any positive labor supply shock, should increase the return to capital and spur business investment. These changes should have a positive impact on business creation and expansion, particularly in areas that receive large immigrant inflows. Despite this clear prediction, there...

Despite a sequence of labor market reforms in recent years, employment of older workers in Germany is still lower than in many other European countries. The paper explains this by institutional factors that affect labor supply, labor demand and matching, i.e. labor market regulation, human...

Over the past three decades Germany has repeatedly deregulated the law on temporary agency work by stepwise increasing the maximum period for hiring-out employees and allowing temporary work agencies to conclude fixed-term contracts. These reforms should have had an effect on the employment...

We identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on conscripts' subsequent labor-market outcomes by exploiting the regression-discontinuity design of the military draft in Germany during the 1950s. Unbiased estimates of the effect of military service on lifetime earnings, wages, and...

In view of the demographic trends, most EU countries face the problem of a declining work force in the future. Understanding the interaction between income support systems (such as unemployment benefits, social assistance, early retirement and pension systems) and total labor supply is of...