This study explores the plausibility of extending research on income inequality to incorporate relative living standards based on household head's industry of employment. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study is used to assess the relative level and movement of per capita disposable household...

One of the most frequently expressed concerns about the unprecedented economic boom that Ireland experienced in the second half of the 1990s has been that the benefits were not shared evenly, that rising living standards were accompanied by widening gaps leaving Ireland with a particularly...

This article investigates the dual-earner model in families with children in Finland and Sweden from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s. During this period the two countries introduced the same kind as well as different kinds of policies in relation to the dual-earner model....

Die vorliegende Recherche wurde von der ÖSB-Unternehmensberatung Gesellschaft mbH in Wien in Kooperation mit dem Institut für Gewerbe- und Handelsforschung (ebenfalls Wien) im Kontext des Rahmenvertrages 2001/2002 'Internationale Recherchen', beauftragt vom Arbeitsmarktservice Österreich,...

In this paper we analyse the Finnish consumer price changes from February 1997 to December 2004 on the basis of a set of microdata which covers over half of the items included in the Finnish CPI. Our findings can be summarised with four stylised facts. Firstly, only a small fraction of prices...

This paper examines the impact of downward wage rigidity (nominal and real) on optimal steady-state inflation. For this purpose, we extend the workhorse model of Erceg, Henderson and Levin (2000) by introducing asymmetric menu costs for wage setting. We estimate the key parameters by simulated...

In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of Employment Protection Legislation...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...

The Finnish welfare state is examined in contrast to Sweden, and the public policy of the US and UK. Analyses presented provide strong evidence of the capability of the Nordic welfare model in the equitable alleviation of poverty among all sections of the population