We bring the notion of connectedness (Diebold and Yilmaz, 2012) to a set of two critical macroeconomic variables as inflation and unemployment. We focus on the G7 economies plus Spain, and use monthly data –high-frequency data in a macro setting– to explore the extent and consequences of...

The relationship between economic and political liberalization has received a great deal of attention lately, yet the possibility of a nonlinear relationship and the role of reversals remain largely neglected. Focusing on democratization and financial reform, this paper offers evidence for a...

This paper examines the causality relationship between immigration, unemployment and economic growth of the host country. We employ the bootstrap panel Granger causality testing approach of Kónya (2006) that allows to test for causality on each individual country separably by accounting for...

This paper examines empirically the interaction between immigration and host country economic conditions. We employ panel VAR techniques to use a large annual dataset on 22 OECD countries over the period 1987-2009. The VAR approach allows to addresses the endogeneity problem by allowing the...

How do labour market policies influence employment's responsiveness to output fluctuations (employment-output elasticity)? We revisit this question on a panel of OECD countries, which also incorporates the period of the Great Recession. We distinguish between passive and active labour market...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the impact of migration on economic growth for 22 OECD countries between 1986-2006 and relies on a unique data set we compiled that allows us to distinguish net migration of the native-born and foreign-born by skill level. Specifically, after introducing...

Economic theory predicts that military conscription is associated with static inefficiencies as well as with dynamic distortions of the accumulation of human and physical capital. Relative to an economy with an all-volunteer force, output levels and growth rates should be lower in countries that...

Does a country's level of unemployment have an impact on the long-run growth rate? Incorporating unemployment into a generalised augmented Solow-type growth model, yields some answers to this question. In particular, we show that the impact of unemployment on productivity growth heavily depends...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...