The time series of various economic variables often exhibit asymmetry: decreases in the values tend to be sharp and fast, whereas increases usually occur slowly and gradually. We detect signs of an analogous asymmetry in firms’ wage setting behaviour on the basis of managerial surveys, with...

We live in a service economy, but the extent of development of service employment differs across developed countries. This paper assesses the role of structural factors and institutions in explaining the common patterns and main differences in the recent expansion of service employment in OECD...

Using the Albrecht et al. (2003) version of the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition technique along the wage distribution, we find that immigrant workers do not affect changes in the Czech wage structure between 2002 and 2006 despite their substantial inflows. Instead, changes in the wage...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state -space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component,...