The paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned about the effects of these institutions on economic outcomes. It identifies...

This paper assesses the impacts of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) on trade in both goods and services among members using a gravity model applied to a panel dataset covering 20 OECD countries over the period 1996-2008 for trade in goods and 1999-2008 for trade in services. The...

Large population / rapidly growing economies such as China and India have argued that in the upcoming UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen, any emission reduction targets they take on should be based on their intensity of emissions (emissions/$GDP) on a target date not the level of emissions. They...

The evidence and analysis in this paper support the earlier findings of Feldstein and Horioka (1980) that sustained increases in domestic savings rates induce approximately equal increases in domestic rates of investment. New estimates for the post-OPEC period 1974-79 imply that each extra...

This paper estimates the effect of changing union density on earnings differentials and inequality among male workers in the U.S. and on industry earnings differentials among OECD countries. For the U.S. the evidence indicates that the fall in union density contributed to the 1980s increase in...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

This paper analyzes the effect of outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) on the domestic capital stock. The first part of the paper shows that only about 20 percent of the value of assets owned by U.S. affiliates abroad is financed by cross-border flows of capital from the United States. An...

I discuss the tax treatment of transborder capital income, focussing on prevailing arrangements rather than de novo design of optimal tax arrangements. These comprise unilateral reliefs from double taxation under credit or exemption systems, and treaty reliefs (largely following the OECD model...

This paper extends earlier work by Feldstein and Horioka on the relation between domestic saving rates and international capital flows or, equivalently, between domestic saving rates and domestic investment. The basic conclusion of the present analysis is that an increase in domestic saving has...

In the paper we discuss China's participation in both the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations on a post-Kyoto global climate change regime currently under way and out beyond Copenhagen in further negotiations likely to follow. China is now both the largest and most rapidly growing carbon emitter, and...