This paper analyses the effects of a large reform in the minimum wages affecting youth workers in New Zealand since 2001. Prior to this reform, a youth minimum wage, applying to 16-19 year-olds, was set at 60% of the adult minimum. The reform had two components. First, it lowered the eligible...

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

Many immigrants are overqualified in their first job after arrival in the host country. Education-occupation mismatch can affect the economic integration of immigrants and the returns to education and experience. The extent of this problem has been measured in recent years by means of micro...

This is a survey of some of the key studies in the literature on international migration in history that may be described as cliometric. This literature uses the concepts and approaches of applied economics to investigate a range of historical issues and there are strong parallels with the...

This chapter discusses the strong impact of economic forces, and changes in the economic environment, on American Jewish observance and American Jewish religious institutions in the 20th century. Beginning with the immigrants' experience of dramatic economic change between the old country and...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...

New Zealand has a unique accident insurance system that pays the direct costs of all accidental injuries and compensates workers 80% of their earnings for any time post-injury that they are unable to work. Statistics New Zealand's Linked Employer-Employee Database contains monthly information on...

In seeking economic immigrants, especially those who are skilled, entrepreneurial and with capital to invest, a settler country such as New Zealand has assumed that national and city labour markets/economies will gain by adding to the human capital pool as well as creating new 'economic'...

Between 1984 and 2003, New Zealand undertook comprehensive market-oriented economic reforms. In this paper, we use Census data to examine how the internal mobility of Māori compares to that of Europeans in New Zealand in the period after these reforms. It is often suggested that Māori are less...

Since the 1980s, income inequality in New Zealand has been a growing concern - particularly in metropolitan areas. At the same time, the encouragement of permanent and temporary immigration has led to the foreign-born accounting for a growing share of the population; this is disproportionally so...