This paper estimates the effect of minimum wage regulation in 16 OECD countries, 1970-2008. Our treatment is motivated by Neumark and Wascher's (2004) seminal cross-country study using panel methods to estimate minimum wage effects among teenagers and young adults. Apart from the longer time...

In the neoclassical production functions model technical change (TC) is assumed to be exogenous and it is specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect the rate of TC. In this paper we model TC via a combination of time trend (purely...

This paper compares the poverty reduction impact of income sources, taxes and transfers across five OECD countries. Since the estimation of that impact can depend on the order in which the various income sources are introduced into the analysis, it is done by using the Shapley value. Estimates...

The Great Recession triggered a resurgence of short-time work (STW) throughout the OECD. Several countries introduced from scratch STW or significantly expanded the scope of the programmes already in place. In some countries like Italy, Japan and Germany between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the...

Recent discussions about rising inequality in industrialized countries have triggered calls for more government intervention and redistribution. Due to obvious behavioral effects caused by redistribution, it is however not clear whether redistributional policies are indeed able to combat...

We use a range of data sources to assess if, and to what extent, government redistribution policies have slowed or accelerated the trend towards greater income disparities in the past 20-25 years. In most countries, inequality among non-elderly households has widened during most phases of the...

In closed or open economy models with complete markets, targeting core inflation enables monetary policy to maximize welfare by replicating the flexible price equilibrium. We analyze this result in the context of developing economies, where a large proportion of households are credit constrained...

We develop a two-sector, heterogeneous-agent model with incomplete financial markets to study the distributional effects and aggregate welfare implications of alternative monetary policy rules in emerging market economies. Relative to inflation targeting, exchange rate management benefits...