This paper presents an impact evaluation of the French enterprise zone program which was initiated in 1997 to help unemployed workers find employment by granting a significant wage-tax exemption (about one third of total labor costs) to firms hiring at least 20% of their labor force locally....

China’s Belt and Road Initiative was introduced in 2013 to revitalise the Silk Road and promote economic development and integration. This paper investigates the economic effects of the opening of the only high-speed rail (HSR) line in northwest China which connects China’s northwestern...

Does over-education assist or hinder occupational advancement? Career mobility theory hypothesizes that over-education leads to a higher level of occupational advancement and wage growth over time, with mixed international empirical evidence. This paper re-tests career mobility theory directly...

This paper documents a number of facts about worker gross flows in the United Kingdom for the period between 1993 and 2010. Using Labour Force Survey data, I examine the size and cyclicality of the flows and transition probabilities between employment, unemployment and inactivity, from several...

The job search literature suggests that on-the-job search reduces the probability of unemployed people finding a job. However, there is no evidence that employed and unemployed job seekers are similar or apply for the same jobs. We combine the Labour Force Survey and the British Household Panel...

This paper pursues three aims. First, we provide a review of current theoretical advances which pertain to the relationship between trade, FDI and labor markets. We do so under the following (not mutually exclusive) headings: (1) slicing-up the value added chain and the turn to a task-based...

Adopting a simple Phillips curve framework, we show that different labour market institutions across EU countries are associated with significant differences in the response of inflation to unemployment and exchange rate shocks. More wage coordination and higher union density flatten the...

This paper challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical “natural rate of unemployment” (NRU). Our analysis suggests that the British NRU has...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labor market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

I examine the effect of labour market policies and institutions on the transmission of macroeconomic shocks to the labour market, using both aggregate and industry-level annual data for 23 OECD countries, 23 business-sector industries and up to 29 years. I find that high and progressive labour...