Die Lissabon-Agenda sieht eine Steigerung der Ausgaben für Forschung und Entwicklung bis zum Jahr 2010 auf drei Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts vor. Europa will damit zu einem der wettbewerbsfähigsten und dynamischsten Wirtschaftsräume werden. Wesentlich für die Zukunftsfähigkeit eines...

In 1975, 50 year-old Americans could expect to live slightly longer than their European counterparts. By 2005, American life expectancy at that age has diverged substantially compared to Europe. We find that this growing longevity gap is primarily the symptom of real declines in the health of...

We compare health care inequity in Japan with that in other OECD countries in 2002 and 2003. To overcome Japanese data problems, we conducted an original survey. Although some problems remain, we obtained internationally comparable results on health care inequity for Japan. We test the...

We use longitudinal individual wage and employment data in France and the United States to investigate the effect of changes in the real minimum wage rate on an individual?s employment status. We focus on workers employed at wages close enough to the minimum in a reference year as to be illegal...

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...

This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of equivalent affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

How important is mastering information and communication technologies (ICT) in modern labor markets? We present the first evidence on this question, drawing on unique data that provide internationally comparable information on ICT skills in 19 countries. Our identification strategy relies on the...