Inter-regional migration – the movements of the population from one region to another within the same country – can be an important mechanism of spatial economic adjustment, affecting regional demographic and growth patterns. This paper examines the economic and housing-related factors that...

Regions with large cities are driving growth in Bulgaria, while many rural regions suffer from depopulation and rapid ageing. Improving living standards across all regions will require better coverage and access to public services, notably in health and long-term care. Policy action to integrate...

Differences in average wages across firms – which account for around one-half of overall wage inequality – are mainly explained by differences in firm wage premia (the part of wages that depends exclusively on characteristics of firms) rather than workforce composition. Using a new...

This paper sheds light on inter-regional migration, housing and the role of policies, drawing on a new comparative cross-country approach. The results show that OECD countries exhibit stark variation in both levels and trends in inter-regional migration, which is found to be highly responsive to...

Governments around the world have adopted unprecedented policies to deal with COVID-19. This paper zooms in on business shutdowns and investigates their effectiveness in reducing mortality. We leverage highly granular death registry data for almost 5,000 Italian municipalities in a diff-in-diff...

immigration for natives' labour market outcomes, as well as issues linked to immigrants' integration in the host country labour market. Changes in the share of immigrants in the labour force may have a distributive impact on natives' wages, and a temporary impact on unemployment. However, labour...

Welfare-to-work measures are a central theme of Israel’s labour and social policies to tackle relative poverty, which is concentrated among the Arab-Israeli and Ultra-orthodox (Haredi) communities. Policies include pilot programmes involving private-sector job placement (the “Wisconsin”...

House prices have risen strongly in past years, helped by rising incomes and declining interest rates. At the same time, construction of new dwellings has remained fairly muted and has only recently shown signs of picking up. A characteristic feature of the Slovak housing market, and a...

China’s population is set to age fast, owing to low fertility and rising life expectancy. With ongoing migration of the younger cohorts to urban areas the increase in the old-age dependency ratio will be even more pronounced in rural than in urban areas. Very different pension arrangements...

Overall, health outcomes in China have improved tremendously over the past three decades, especially thanks to the reduction in some traditional infectious diseases. However, death rates from chronic diseases have been on the rise, not least owing to changes in life styles and deteriorating...