The European Parliament has recently approved new binding pay transparency measures to promote ''Equal Pay for Equal Work'', an EU founding principle which is at the heart of the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan towards 2030. Using harmonized microdata for the EU 27 countries and a...

China's manufacturing sector has been a key source of the economy's dynamism. Analysis after 2007 however is hampered by problems in the key data source for empirical analysis, the National Bureau of Statistics' (NBS) annual survey of industrial firms. Issues include missing information on value...

Are recessions drivers of structural change? Here we investigate the resilience of cities, and argue that a re-allocation of labour between industrial sectors in times of crisis induces an acceleration in structural change. Using UK data, we find that cities experienced a sharp increase in...

We study how monetary policy should respond to shocks which permanently alter the steady state structure of the economy. In such a case monetary policy affects not only the short run misallocations due to nominal rigidities, but also relative prices which stimulate reallocation of capital. We...

The digital transition of the economy is widely expected to change the nature of work. This may happen both through creating new digital job profiles, and by digitising existing jobs. As these changes unfold, new digital skills may be needed at the workplace. We track the trends in demand for...

The Barcelona targets on childcare help increase women's labour-market participation and close the gender employment gap by enhancing the provision of early childhood education and care. To contribute to the debate on the revision of the targets, this paper estimates the impact on labour par-...

Education has long been perceived as a great equalizer, but even with universal rises in schooling years, income distribution worsened world-wide. We propose a method for decomposing the contribution of a variable to the change in inequality into mean, dispersion, and price components. The...

A number of studies documents that minimum wage policies have the potential to reduce income inequality. The recently adopted EU Commission's proposal for a Directive on adequate minimum wages was supported by a detailed analysis of the social impacts of hypothetical minimum wage levels in...

Concerns about widening inequality have increased attention on the topic of equality of opportunities and intergenerational mobility. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to analyse how educational and income mobility has evolved in the United States of America. We show...