In Switzerland a sudden policy uncertainty shock happened in February 2014 with the close and largely unexpected acceptance of a referendum aiming at limiting free movement of persons. The referendum requires Switzerland to reintroduce annual quotas for immigrants within three years. The...

Conventional wisdom and prevailing economic theory hold that the new owners of a privatized firm will cut jobs and wages. But this ignores the possibility that new owners will expand the firm's scale, with potentially positive effects on employment, wages, and productivity. Evidence generally...

In considering pathways to industrialization in the twenty-first century, cognisance needs to be taken of the fact that many countries have actually been deindustrializing. This paper analyses deindustrialization experiences internationally, by decomposing changes in the level and share of...

This paper evaluates the effects for the Spanish case of allowing greater flexibility regarding the weekly hours worked on the working week, employment and productivity. A baseline model economy is calibrated to reproduce the cross-sectional distribution of workweeks across plants, as well as...

We use national labor force surveys from 1983 through 2011 to construct hours worked per person on the aggregate level and for different demographic groups for 18 European countries and the US. We find that Europeans work 19% fewer hours than US citizens. Differences in weeks worked and in the...

We use national labor force surveys from 1983 through 2011 to construct hours worked per person on the aggregate level and for different demographic groups for 18 European countries and the US. We find that Europeans work 19% fewer hours than US citizens. Differences in weeks worked and in the...

The global financial and economic crisis – including two euro area recessions in 2008-2009 and 2011-2013 – has had a heavy impact on euro area labour markets. A notable feature throughout the crisis has been the considerable degree of cross-country heterogeneity of labour market adjustments...

A search-theoretic model of the labor market with idiosyncratic fluctuations in hours worked, search both off- and on-the-job, and multiple jobholding is developed. Taking on a second job entails a commitment to hold onto the primary employer, enabling the worker to use the primary job as her...

This report surveys the literature on the employment impact of ICT. Two competing views - compensation and substitution theory - dominate the current economic debate. The first assumes that the labour-saving impact of technological progress is counterbalanced by various compensation mechanisms....

This paper provides an overview of longer-term structural developments in the new EU Member States from Central and Eastern Europe (NMS). It analyses structural changes in the NMS' economies and patterns of productivity catching-up both at macro level and within the individual industries. With...