The strikingly different labor market performance of major industrial countries suggests that neither globalization nor skill-biased technological change necessarily result in rising unemployment or declining wages of low-skilled workers. Rather, globalization and technological change cause...

We consider the issue of steady-state optimal factor taxation in a Ramsey-type dynamic general equilibrium setting with two distinct distortions: i) taxes on capital and labour are the only available tax instruments for raising revenues, and ii) labour markets are subject to a static...

The EU candidate and potential candidate countries have made considerable progress in economic transition and integration into the world economy within less than two decades. Nevertheless, gaps in terms of income per capita relative to the euro area remain large. This suggests that the...

This paper analyzes the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job reallocation in a cross-country framework. In the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998) and Ciccone and Papaioannou (2006), we exploit variation in...

The debate in Australia on the (constant-output) elasticity of labour demand with respect to wages has wrongly sidelined the role of capital stock as a determinant of employment (Webster, 2003). As far back as 1991, Pissarides had argued that the influence of capital stock on the performance of...

The factors behind the increase in the relative wages of skilled workers in developing countries are still not well understood. The authors use data from Peru to analyze the determinants of within-industry share of skilled workers. They use a translog cost function for gross output and are...