This paper shows that in ation in industrialized countries is largely a global phenomenon. First, the inflation rates of 22 OECD countries have a common factor that alone accounts for nearly 70 percent of their variance. This large variance share that is associated with Global Inflation is not...

Can green growth policies help protect the environment while keeping the industry growing and infrastructure expanding? This study applies Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method on the 50-years' time series data, from 1967 to 2015, of Kitakyushu City, Japan, and found mixed evidence for...

Collective skill formation systems were central to sustaining a high-road approach to economic development in industrial societies while maintaining social inclusion. But can they still deliver in knowledge-based societies, both economically and socially? This article argues that nothing...

Using various statistical procedures, estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 110 developing, transition and OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 1999-2000 in developing countries is 41%, in transition countries 38% and...

What determines the structure of labour market institutions? This paper argues that common explanations based on rent sharing are incomplete; unions, job protection, and egalitarian pay structures may have as much to do with social insurance of otherwise uninsurable risks as with rent sharing and...

We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and fertility. We begin with a discussion of the historical introduction of family...

One of the fundamental problems of the positive theory of income taxation is explaining why the statutory income tax schedules in all industrialized democracies are marginal-rate progressive. While it is commonly believed that this is but a simple consequence of the fact that the number of...

This paper investigates the relationship between exchange rate pass-through and exchange rate appreciations/depreciations and inflation by estimating nonlinear time series models. Motivated by theoretical and empirical results in the literature, the paper proposes new econometric models that can...

Health economists have studied the determinants of the expected value of health status as a function of medical and nonmedical inputs, often finding small marginal effects of the former. This paper argues that both types of input have an additional benefit, viz. a reduced variability of health...

Parental leave regulations in most OECD countries have two key policy instruments: job protection and cash benefits. This paper studies how mothers' return to work behavior and labor market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of these key policy parameters. Exploiting a series of major...