The qualitative and granular nature of most structural indicators and the variety in data sources poses difficulties for consistent cross-country assessments and empirical analysis. We overcome these issues by using a machine learning approach (the partial least squares method) to combine a...

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the macroeconomic, distributional, and fiscal effects of three reform proposals for Germany: i) a reduction in the social security tax in the low-wage sector, ii) a publicly financed expansion of full-day child care and full-day schooling, and...

Uruguay enjoys favorable social outcomes, and its labor indicators are comparable to other Latin American countries, but its youth unemployment is one of the highest in the world. To help understand this duality, we employ synthetic panels from repeated household surveys for LA6 countries from...

Using data from the Vietnam Labor Force Survey, this paper takes a granular look at the mostsalient drivers of labor informality in Vietnam by examining: (i) the nature of labor informalityand transitions from formal to informal employment status and the role of worker characteristics;(ii) the...

This paper considers the adjustment of physical capital within a country in the long run and in the short run. It uses a unique data set on income, labor, human capital, and private and public physical capital in the Spanish regions over the past two decades. In the long run, the movement of...

While unemployment rates in Europe declined after the global financial crisis until 2018/19, the incidence of long-term unemployment, the share of people who have been unemployed for more than one year to the total unemployed, remained high. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic could aggravate the...

While the level of disparities across regions in 10 advanced European economies studied in this paper mostly reflects productivity gaps, the increase since the Great Recession has resulted from diverging unemployment rates. Following the pandemic, this could be further exacerbated given...

How often have wage-price spirals occurred, and what has happened in their aftermath? We investigate this by creating a database of past wage-price spirals among a wide set of advanced economies going back to the 1960s. We define a wage-price spiral as an episode where at least three out of four...

What are the implications of the needed climate transition for the potential reallocation of the U.S. labor force? This paper dissects green and polluting jobs in the United States across local labor markets, industries and at the household-level. We find that geography alone is not a major...

Using the near universe of online vacancy postings in the U.S., we study the interaction between labor market power and monetary policy. We show empirically that labor market power amplifies the labor demand effects of monetary policy, while not disproportionately affecting wage growth. A search...