Occupational licensing and non-competition agreements are two important types of labour market regulation in the United States, both covering around one fifth of all workers. While some regulation is needed to protect safety and ensure quality of services, it also creates entry barriers and...

China has made impressive strides in education in recent decades, even though the accumulation of human capital has lagged behind that of physical capital. Going forward, access to and quality of education will be key to sustain economic convergence with the most advanced economies and to offset...

In recent years, many tertiary graduates have had difficulties finding a job, while factories have been struggling to recruit workers. Notwithstanding rapidly increasing education attainment, graduates’ skills do not seem to match those demanded by the market. Moreover, structural changes in...

The unemployment rate among young people has reached painfully high levels, in particular among those young people with low levels of education. There are two crucial policy priorities to improve employment prospects for youth in Spain. First, in the very short term, there is need for quick...

In light of population ageing, globalisation, automation, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand’s labour market is being significantly reshaped, and so are the skills required for higher employability. This paper analyses the capacity of Thailand’s education and training system...

Never in the past 30 years has productivity growth been lower than since the 2008 global financial crisis, and never has income inequality been higher than it is today in Japan, and in the OECD area. The two challenges have some common origins, including a widening productivity and wage gap...

Canada’s productivity performance has lagged that of many other OECD countries, despite some improvement in recent years. One measure to enhance overall efficiency would be to strengthen competition on the domestic market to drive future multi-factor productivity improvements. The potential...

This paper studies the association between occupational licensing and job hire and job separation rates along with earnings of job stayers and job-to-job movers. In contrast to previous studies, it attempts to provide macro-level estimates by relying on a novel Job-to-Job Flows database from the...

This paper assesses the possible dynamic effects of occupational entry regulations (OER) on productivity. It combines firm-level productivity data with a new cross-country policy indicator measuring the stringency of OER by the presence of administrative burdens, qualifications requirements, and...