Many countries are placing a greater emphasis on productive skills in the immigrant selection policies as a way of achieving national objectives regarding immigration. These changes stem primarily from the belief that skill-based immigrants do better in some sense and provide greater economic...

This paper uses data from the 1996 Australian Survey of Aspects of Literacy to examine the effects on labour market outcomes of literacy, numeracy and educational attainment. The survey includes a range of literacy and numeracy variables that are highly inter-correlated. A ?general to specific?...

This paper provides an introduction and overview of my research on the Economics of Language. The approach is that language skills among immigrants and native-born linguistic minorities are a form of human capital. There are costs and benefits associated with this characteristic embodied in the...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate a ?couples-based? policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families without work. In 2000 and 2001, the Australian Government piloted a new counseling initiative targeted towards couple-headed families with dependent children in which...

The debate in Australia on the (constant-output) elasticity of labour demand with respect to wages has wrongly sidelined the role of capital stock as a determinant of employment (Webster, 2003). As far back as 1991, Pissarides had argued that the influence of capital stock on the performance of...

This paper analyzes the contribution of the socioeconomic and demographic composition of the pool of employed and unemployed individuals to the dynamics of the labor market in different phases of the business cycle. Using individual level data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we...

Econometric evaluations of public-sponsored training programmes generally find littleevidence of an impact of such policies on transition rates out of unemployment. We performthe first evaluation of training effects for the unemployed adults in France, exploiting a uniquelongitudinal dataset...

Die Arbeitsmarktreformen der letzten Jahre haben die strukturellen Anpassungsproblemedes deutschen Beschäftigungsmodells zum Teil gelindert - allerdings sind noch längst nichtalle Schwierigkeiten überwunden...

Differences in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large andpersistent. We show that inherited variation in human-capital endowment across the regionsof four such economies explains the bulk of regional unemployment variation there and weexplore potential explanations for this...

Although an inverse relationship between sickness absence and unemployment has beendocumented in a number of studies using either quarterly or annual data from differentcountries with varying institutional frameworks, it is not yet clear whether this empiricalregularity is due to changes in the...