In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an 'empirical law of economics' -the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries. Our paper reconsiders...

In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an ‘empirical law of economics’ – the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries. Our paper...

The wage curve introduced by Blanchflower and Oswald (1990, 1994) postulates a negative correlation between wages and unemployment. Empirical results focus on particular theoretical channels establishing the relationship. Panel models mostly draw on unionized bargaining or the efficiency wage...

Faster urbanization plays a key role in the Chinese economic transformation. However, at the Lewis turning point, the hukou institution constitutes a serious risk to the process, as it restricts the access of migrants to public services offered by cities. To attract further migration, firms...

Minimum wages may be an important instrument to reduce income inequality in a society and to promote socially inclusive economic growth. While higher minimum wages can support the Chinese transformation towards consumption driven growth, they can worsen the price competitiveness in export...

Previous literature shows that internal migration rates are strongly procyclical. This would seem to imply that geographic relocation does not help mitigate negative local economic shocks during recessions. This paper shows that this is not the case. I document that net in-migration rates...

Together with the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, there has been a growing divide in the earnings of urban and rural residents. In this paper we focus on China's household registration system, or "hukou", as a potential source of the earnings gap. Using multiple waves of data from the...

Previous literature shows that internal migration rates are strongly procyclical. This would seem to imply that geographic relocation does not help mitigate negative local economic shocks during recessions. This paper shows that this is not the case. I document that net in-migration rates...

To date, analysis of the spatial dimension of New Zealand labour markets has been limited to administrative, rather than appropriately-defined functional, geographic units. This paper presents a preliminary classification of New Zealand into local labour market areas using area unit...

During the last decade there have been marked changes in the composition of the non-native workforce in the German labour market. In particular there has been a notable increase in the diversity of nationalities of which the foreign workforce is composed. In this paper we investigate the effects...