Why is Europe's employment rate almost 10 percent lower than that of the United States? This "jobs gap" has typically been blamed on the rigidity of European labor markets. But in <i>Services and Employment</i>, an international group of leading labor economists suggests quite a different explanation....

Analyzing prices of truly homogenous consumer goods sold in Euroland, we find significant price convergence after the Euro cash changeover in 2002. The deviation of national log prices from the mean log price of the same product is much narrower with the Euro than before. We observe Sigma and...

Auf die Finanzkrise haben die Zentralbanken und die Regierungen mit ungewöhnlichen Maßnahmen reagiert. Die Geldpolitik senkt die Zentralbankzinsen bis auf die Nullgrenze, die Wirtschaftspolitik ist bemüht, mit riesigen Konjunkturprogrammen die Rezession zu bekämpfen. Diese Maßnahmen...

The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the ‘classics’, however (Fisher (1935),...

An update of Victor Fuchs analysis shows an astonishing regularity of the relationship between per capita income and service industry employment. The two major theoretical hypotheses for the growth of the service sector, shifts in final demand towards services and the technological stagnancy of...

Women work much more in the US than in Germany and most other EU economies. We find that theUS¿German employment gap is not strongly related to cross-country differences in the level of pay orsocial benefits. The difference in employment is due to the different marketization of activities...

In the long history of rising and persistent unemployment in Europe, almost all welfare-state institutions--employment protection legislation, unions, wages, wage structure, unemployment insurance, etc.--have been alleged to have caused and found guilty of causing this tragic development at some...