Labor’s share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

Becker (1974) introduced to modern economics the idea that others care about what others think about them and derived many useful insights from this assumption. But he did not provide a very complete description of the general equilibrium of an economy in which people both demand respect from...

Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

In the conventional perfectly competitive model of the labour market, wage-setting is individualistic in the sense that identical workers should receive identical wages in different firms and different workers should receive different wages in the same firm. But, in reality, wages often seem to...

It is common to hear the argument that poor labour market performance in OECD countries in recent years is the result of shifts in relative demand against less-skilled workers. But, there is much dispute about whether these trends have been occurring and, if they have, how important they are in...

One of the most striking features of European labour markets is the high incidence of long-term unemployment. In this paper we review the literature on its causes and consequences. Our main conclusions are that: the rise in the incidence of long-term unemployment has been ''caused'' by a...

Most studies of the gender pay gap use cross-section earnings functions to apply a Oaxaca decomposition into the contributions of differences in characteristics and coefficients. But the accounts that these studies provide of the gender pay gap are often hard to relate to more informal stories...

The human capital earnings function is part of the toolbox of labour economists. Returns to labour market experience are interpreted as returns to general human capital, and returns to job tenure as returns to job-specific human capital. There is, however, an awareness that there are other...

Human capital theory provides the generally accepted interpretation of the relationship between earnings and labour market experience, namely that general human capital tends to increase with experience. However, there are other plausible interpretations e.g. search models generally predict that...

A number of researchers have argued that men and women have different attitudes toward and behavioral responses to competition; that is, women are more likely to opt out of jobs in which performance pay is the norm and to under-perform in some competitive situations. Laboratory experiments...