With the beginnings of a worldwide burgeoning development of matched firm-employee data, it is worthwhile to examine the possibilities for using these data. This essay discusses a variety of areas in which some progress has been made and presents ideas for future research in a number of others,...

Europeans have worked less than Americans since the 1970s. In this paper, we quantify the relative importance of the extensive and intensive margins of aggregate hours of market work on the observed differences. Our counterfactual exercises show that the two dimensions of the extensive margin,...

The paper deals with measurement error, and its potentially distorting role, in information on industry and professional status collected by labour force surveys. The focus of our analyses is on inconsistent information on these employment characteristics resulting from yearly transition...

In this paper we describe an alternative iterative approach for the estimation of linear regression models with high-dimensional fixed-effects such as large employer-employee data sets. This approach is computationally intensive but imposes minimum memory requirements. We also show that the...

Hours worked is an important economic indicator. In addition to being a measure of labor utilization, average weekly hours are inputs into measures of productivity and hourly wages, which are two key economic indicators. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' two hours series tell very...

Labor market statistics are critical for assessing and understanding economic development. In practice, widespread variation exists in how labor statistics are measured in household surveys in low-income countries. Little is known whether these differences have an effect on the labor statistics...

Methods for the analysis of linked employer-employee data are not yet available in standard econometrics packages. In this paper, we make the fixed-effects methods developed orginally by Abowd, Kramarz, Margolis and others more accessible, where possible, and show how they can be implemented in...

Using recent results in the measurement error literature, we show that the official U.S. unemployment rates substantially underestimate the true levels of unemployment, due to misclassification errors in labor force status in Current Population Surveys. Our closed-form identification of the...

Using recent results in the measurement error literature, we show that the official U.S. unemployment rates substantially underestimate the true levels of unemployment, due to misclassification errors in labor force status in Current Population Surveys. Our closed-form identification of the...