Employment volatility is larger for young and old workers than for prime aged. At the same time, in economies with high tax rates, the share of total hours supplied by the young/old workers is smaller. These two observations imply a negative correlation between government size (measured by the...

In a path-breaking but largely overlooked study, published in a festchrift thirty years ago (1975), Herman Van der Wee provided a comparison of prices and real wages of building craftsmen in the regions of Antwerp and south-eastern England, from 1400 to 1700. To do so, he constructed a composite...

In recessions, predominantly men lose their jobs, which has given rise to the term "man-cessions". We analyze whether fiscal expansions bring men back into jobs. To do so, we estimate vector-autoregressive models and identify the effects of fiscal shocks and non-fiscal shocks on the gender...

This is a review article by Andrew Sharpe from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards of Angus Maddison's path-breaking new book, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. The article summarizes Maddison's key findings in a number of areas, with particular emphasis on his estimates of...

Labour force participation is a topical issue in New Zealand. It is well known that the participation of New Zealand women aged 25-39 is low in comparison with women in other OECD countries. There has been considerable interest in policies which might raise women’s participation. This paper...

This paper explores five main questions regarding the gender distribution of work, primarily in the context of couples with young children. These are: how much total paid and unpaid work is carried out in New Zealand?; how is this work shared between women and men?; how does this compare with...

This paper examines the effects of demographic changes in Japan upon the social security system, labor market, household savings rate, and economic growth. The results are, firstly, to confirm, in the face of these demographic changes, (1) the increasing difficulty of maintaining the current...

The purpose of this paper is to extend the Fields’ (1989) multi sector job-search model in a three sector general equilibrium framework by introducing international trade and an input, capital. The three sectors are the rural sector, the urban informal sector and the urban formal sector. The...

The objective of this paper is to characterize the population between 15 and 19 years of age in Mexico which does not study and does not work (NiNi). We use the population censuses for 1990, 2000 and 2010, income and expenditure household surveys from 1992 to 2010, and labor surveys from 2005 to...

The circular interplay between demography-employment-productivity-PayGo is investigated for Italy and Italian geographical repartitions. Looking forward to the mid-long run, the paper offers simulations of the burden each effective worker and each active citizen will have to bear to finance via...