The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...

This note tests whether the extraordinary rise in Spanish unemployment in the 1980s can be traced back to rigidities in the wage structure in the face of relative net demand shocks against the unskilled (this claim is also known as the 'Krugman hypothesis'). I can establish that youth...