This paper outlines the importance of labor mobility for the improvement in allocating and distributing economic resources. We are faced with an increasing lack of skilled workers and a growing tendency of unemployment amongst the low-skilled. A central political objective for the future will...

Intra‐EU mobility has been the subject of debate from its very inception. Some scholars argue that intra‐EU labour migration improves the allocation of human capital in the EU and contend that the level of permanent‐type labour mobility is still too low to talk of a single European labour...

A Single European Labor Market, particularly involving the free movement of workers within Europe, has been a goal of the European community since the 1950s. Whereas it may entail opportunities and drawbacks alike, the benefits – such as greater economic welfare for most citizens – are...

This paper studies the labor market effects of out- and in-migration in the context of cross-border commuting. It investigates an EU policy reform that granted Czech citizens full access to the German labor market, resulting in a Czech commuter outflow across the border to Germany. Exploiting...

For a large set of countries, we document how the labor earnings inequality varies with GDP per capita. As countries get richer, the mean-to-median ratio and the Gini coefficient decline. Yet, this decline masks divergent patterns: while inequality at the top of the earnings distribution falls,...

This paper contributes to the literature on macroeconometric evaluation of active labour market policies (ALMP) by considering the regional effects on both the matching process and the job-seeker rate. We use an unique new data set on all Austrian job-seekers between 2001 to 2007 and apply GMM...

We analyze the fertility and health effects resulting from the abolition of the Austrian baby bonus in January 1997. The abolition of the benefit was publicly announced about ten months in advance, creating the opportunity for prospective parents to (re-)schedule conceptions accordingly. We find...