In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries make it clear that urbanization and industrialization are strongly associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe a model economy in which...

Theoretical reasoning justifies different signs of the relationship between the local variation in unemployment rates and the extent of workers reallocation. This paper aims to test different theoretical hypotheses in the case of Italy by using the longitudinal files of the Italian labour force...

Recent work has documented declines in the labor income share in the United States and beyond. This paper documents that these trends differ between manufacturing and services in the U.S. and in a broad set of other industrialized economies, and shows that a model where the degree of...

There is a growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the sectoral allocation of resources, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand...

This paper delves into the recent events that led to the formation of the housing bubble in Spain and the resulting structural change that is arguably needed to put the economy back into the right track. For this purpose we calibrate a model with different equilibria descriptive of the labor...

This note is a companion to the Lilien (lilien) and Modified Lilien (mlilien) commands for computing the relative indices in STATA. The note illustrates the main features of the commands with an application to the structural determinants of regional unemployment.

We analyze how globalization has affected the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in Germany over the period 1978-2008. The aggregate German economy is characterized by a secular decline of manufacturing and a rise of modern service industries. This trend– also known as Petty's law – is not...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

This paper shows that the structural breaks are an important characteristic of the monthly labor force participation rate (LFPR) series of Australia, Canada and the USA. Therefore we allow for endogenously determined multiple structural breaks in the empirical specifications of fractionally...

Recent research has documented a U-shaped industrial concentration curve over an economy's development path. How far can neoclassical trade theory take us in explaining this pattern? We estimate the production side of the Heckscher-Ohlin model using industry data on 44 developed and developing...