This paper reviews current issues in youth labour markets in developed countries. It argues that young people aged 16-25 have been particularly hard hit during the current recession. Using the USA and UK as cast studies, it analyses both causes and effects of youth unemployment using micro-data....

This article reviews the effects of the Great Recession on youth labour markets. We argue that young people aged 16-24 have suffered disproportionately during the recession. Using the USA and UK as case studies, we analyse youth unemployment using microdata. We argue that there is convincing...

The U.S. population has become increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas. However, there are striking differences in between the performances of big cities: some of them have been very successful and have been able to pull away from the rest, while others have stagnated or even...

Job mobility is essential for a well-functioning market economy and for individual workers to boost their wages. This paper provides a re-assessment of job mobility in the United States during 2000-2018, based on a novel administrative data source covering almost all workers and job flows....

From the early 1990s through the peak of the last business cycle, relatively low U.S. unemployment rates seemed to make the United States a model for the rest of the world’s economies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and...

The living standards in Canada, defined as real GDP per capita, declined relative to those in the United States in the 1990s. A key challenge facing Canadians is the reversal of this situation. In this article, Andrew Sharpe of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards develops a framework...

This paper expands on the methodology of Groshen and Potter (2003) for studying cyclical and structural changes in the US economy and analyzes the net structural and cyclical employment trends in the US economy during the last 10 trough-to-trough business cycles from 1949 to the present. It...

In contrast to the decline in labour force participation in Canada in the 1990s, the aggregate participation rate in the United States actually rose slightly (up 0.5 percentage points between 1989 and 1997). This US experience provides a useful benchmark for the analysis of the Canadian...

The gap between Canadian and U.S. living standards widened considerably in the 1990s. Americans, on average, were 16 per cent better off in terms of real personal income per capita in 2000 than in 1989, while Canadians experienced a 5 percent increase in real incomes. The thesis of this paper is...

The foundation for real income growth is productivity growth. This basic principle of economics is well illustrated in this article by Andrew Sharpe of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards on the determinants of trends in living standards in Canada in the 1990s. He shows that over the...