This article describes the changes over decades of the female participation to the labor market in the United States. Theses trends are compared to the French and the Swedish cases. In general, gender inequalities have decreased since the 1950?s. But in average, gender gaps are larger in the...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

Thist article by Andrew Sharpe and Leila Gharani from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards examines the factors behind slow productivity growth in Canada in the second half of the 1990s, in marked contrast to the acceleration of productivity in the United States, and discusses the...

In an article published in Development and Change in 2011, I suggested an alternative measure of inequality to the Gini - a "19th Century statistic" - which has subsequently become known as the ´Palma Ratio'. In this new article, I revisit the argument for such a measure. Using new data, I...

The labor market consists of two tiers. Workers in the upper tier enjoy high wages, good benefits, and employment security, and they are often unionized. Workers in the lower tier experience low wages, high turnover, job insecurity, and little chance of promotion. Until now, dual labor market...

This article compares Canada and the United States in terms of the evolution of the relative wages of production and non-production workers in the manufacturing sector. The results show that the wage ratio is affected by similar economic globalisation variables in each country. Other than...

Different economic characteristics between developing and developed countries may require worker with different skills, resulting in different returns to the same ability. Moreover, it is also possible that different countries require different skills depending on their economic fundamentals....

This paper is concerned with the determinants and consequences of immigrant/linguistic concentrations (enclaves). The reasons for the formation of these concentrations are discussed. Hypotheses are developed regarding "ethnic goods" and the effect of concentrations on the immigrant’s language...

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8-10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...

Measures of social mobility provide an extra dimension for testing job search models. The present note tests the dynamic model in [Acemoglu, D., 1999. Changes in unemployment and wage inequality: an alternative theory and some evidence. American Economic Review 89, 1259-1278] with respect to...