Politicians, the media, and the public express concern that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers, but 30 years of empirical research provide little supporting evidence to this claim. Most studies for industrialized countries have found no effect on wages, on average, and...

Education is a crucial determinant of labour market success. We investigate whether education is an appropriate means to cushion the negative consequences of job loss and study the role of age as a second major labour market factor. Using German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data for the years...

How do firm-level collective agreements affect firm performance in a multi-level bargaining system? Using detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data, our findings show that firm agreements increase both wage costs and labour productivity (with respect to sector-level agreements)....

In developing and transition economies as much as half the labor force works in the informal sector (or "shadow economy"). Informal firms congest infrastructure and other public services but do not contribute the taxes needed to finance them. Informal workers are unprotected against such...

Higher inequality reduces capital accumulation and increases the informal economy, which creates additional employment opportunities for low-skilled and deprived people. Despite this positive feedback, informality raises problems for public finances and biases official statistics, reducing the...

This paper takes stock of informal employment in Russia analysing its incidence and determinants. Using the regular 2003-11 waves and an informality supplement of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) it develops several measures of informal employment and demonstrates that the...

The occupational skill structure depends on the business cycle if employers respond to shortages of applicants during upturns by lowering their hiring standards. Devereux uses this implication to construct empirical tests for the notion of hiring standards adjustment (the so-called Reder...

This paper estimates agglomeration economies in Great Britain. The analysis employs a definition of urban areas as functional economic units developed by the OECD in collaboration with the European Union to investigate the size and sources of productivity disparities across urban areas. It uses...