An increasingly influential technological-discontinuity paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some limited...

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...

Instrumental variable estimation requires untestable exclusion restrictions. With policy effects on individual outcomes, there is typically a time interval between the moment the agent realizes that he may be exposed to the policy and the actual exposure or the announcement of the actual...

This paper uses 1985-1999 manufacturing census data for old Russian enterprises to calculate the magnitude and productivity effects of gross job flow rates before and after reforms. Job creation was low throughout the period in this sector, but increased slightly during the transition, while job...

The present paper examines the capital structure adjustment dynamics of listed non-financial corporations in seven East Asian countries during 1994-2002. Compared to firms in the least affected countries, average leverages were much higher among firms in the worst affected countries while the...

To account for employment evolutions at the macro-economic level, we propose a modelling where employment is explained by added value, working time and real labour cost. Estimations using quarterly French macro-economic data are carried out in a multivariate framework for three sets of sectors....

First moves towards a real understanding of offshoring date back to very recent times. In particular for Japan, the studies conducted so far focus alone on the productivity effects of offshoring at the firm level. Here I carry out the analysis of both the employment and productivity effects at...

We investigate the impact of offshoring on individual level wages and unemployment probabilities and pay particular attention to the question of whether workers on temporary contracts are affected differently than workers on permanent contracts. Data are taken from the German Socio-Economic...

This paper studies the respective influence of intergenerational transmission and the environment in shaping individual trust. Focusing on second generation immigrants in Australia and the United States, we exploit the variation in the home and in the host country to separate the effect of the...

We provide new evidence on the extent to which the demand for cigarettes is derived from the demand for weight control (i.e. weight loss or avoidance of weight gain). We utilize nationally representative data that provide the most direct evidence to date on this question: individuals are...