Collectively agreed reductions of working hours phased out in Europe in the 1990s. During the last two decades, working time became more flexible and heterogeneous. Working hours of full-time employees in the EU hardly changed. The strong increase in part-time work was the outstanding...

Trotz steigender Wirtschaftsleistung hat sich die Lebenszufriedenheit in Deutschland seit Beginn der 90er Jahre nicht erhöht, in Westdeutschland ist sie sogar gesunken. Mehr materieller Wohlstand bedeutet also nicht automatisch mehr Wohlstand im Sinne von Lebensglück. Was aber sind dann die...

This paper assesses empirically the effects of oil price shocks on the real economic activity of the main industrialised countries. Multivariate VAR analysis is carried out using both linear and nonlinear models. The latter category includes three approaches employed in the literature, namely,...

In this paper we review the linkages between the quality of public finances, that is, the level and composition of public expenditure and its financing via revenue and deficits, and economic growth. We review the various channels through which public finances affect growth and its underlying...

Why is GDP so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? To answer this question, we propose a theory of technological diversification. Production makes use of different input varieties, which are subject to imperfectly correlated shocks. As in endogenous growth models,...

Composition of the euro area workforce evolves over time and in response to changing labour market conditions. We construct an estimate of growth in euro area labour quality over the period 1983-2004 and show that labour quality has grown on average by 0.6% year-on-year over this time period....

Not so much and we should not, at least not yet.

Do high levels of human capital foster economic growth by facilitating technology adoption? If so, countries with more human capital should have adopted more rapidly the skilled-labor augmenting technologies becoming available since the 1970’s. High human capital levels should therefore have...

This study examines reforms of public expenditure in industrialised countries over the past two decades. We distinguish ambitious and timid reformers and analyse in detail reform experiences in eight case studies of ambitious reform episodes. We find that ambitious reform countries reduce...