Now that four years have passed since the introduction of the euro as a commercial currency, it has become possible to assess many arguments made in the abstract during the 1990s about the implications of monetary union. This contribution does precisely that. In brief, the euro zone still falls...

Using the rich data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we show that several dimensions of college quality have positive impacts on young women's wages. We find evidence of ability sorting, but controlling for ability, women who attend higher quality colleges earn higher wages. Women...

Using the rich data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we show that several dimensions of college quality have substantial positive impacts on young men's wages. This finding is robust to a wide array of alternative specifications. Controlling for ability reveals that sorting of...

Due to a tax law implemented in 1998, Dutch employers can claim an extra tax deduction when they train employees aged 40 years or older. This causes a discontinuity in a firm's cost of training an employee. We exploit this discontinuity to identify two effects: the effect of the tax deduction on...

This paper compares the role of technological change with that of trade in explaining the increased demand for skilled workers. The paper shows technology has played the dominant role in changing employment patterns in Australia. The finding is consistent across industries, including those...

This paper aims at analysing the relation between competitiveness and economic growth for the period 1995-2000 (2002 for some variables). To this aim we analyse the evolution of the unit labour cost by sector (‘traded’ and ‘non-traded’ sector) and decomposition between the unit labour...

An obvious answer to this question is the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis originally proposed by Zwi Griliches (1969). But the relatively poor performance of this hypothesis suggests that other explanations are needed. Here we consider the labour union behaviour in the wage bargaining...

This paper analyses the dynamics of wage and income inequality in Slovenia from 1993 to 2002, using two different data sources. The first is obtained by extracting relevant information on wage earners from the personal income tax (PIT) database and the second is obtained using published data on...

The study examines the relationship between work arrangements and workplace performance on large capital building sites.

There are two intriguing questions about the transition process undertaken by the Ukraine since its declaration of sovereignty in December 1991. (i) Why had one of the more prosperous republics of the former USSR in terms of economic development and population welfare been suffering of both a...