Time-diary data from 27 countries show a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and female-male differences in total work time—work for pay and work at home. In rich non-Catholic countries on four continents men and women do about the same average amount of total work. Survey...

Using time-diary data from 25 countries, we demonstrate that there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day—the sum of work for pay and work at home. In rich northern countries on four continents there is no...

By any measure, the European Monetary Union and the European Union are in a deep hole. In the summer of 2011 we came uncomfortably close to an uncontrolled sovereign default of an EU country, a member of the European Monetary Union, hardly ten years after the common currency project was...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States with little employment loss. Employers’ reticence to hire in the preceding expansion - associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last - contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only...

Using Solow-Tornqvist residuals as well as two alternative measurements, we present estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in a sample of 30 European economies for the period 1994-2005. In most of Western Europe, we find a deceleration of TFP growth since 2000. However, the...

The secular rise of European unemployment since the 1960s is hard to explain without reference to structural change. This is especially true in Germany, where industrial employment has declined by more than 30% and service sector employment has more than doubled over the past three decades....

This paper establishes theoretical and empirical linkages between union wage setting and the structure of the wage distribution. Theoretically, we identify conditions under which a right-to-manage model implies compression of the wage distribution in the union sector relative to the nonunion...

For more than fifty years, the Solow decomposition (Solow 1957) has served as the standard measurement of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in economics and management, yet little is known about its precision, especially when the capital stock is poorly measured. Using synthetic data...

Temporary help services (THS) offer firms an additional option for flexible adjustment of employment levels. In addition, THS can facilitate new employment for both labor market entrants and job losers. This survey examines the economic significance, the changing regulatory framework, and the...