Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon...

Most apparent differences between US and continental law lose their relevance once one looks beneath the doctrinal surface and checks how doctrine plays itself out in concrete cases. One of the few exceptions is standards of proof. Not only distinguishes US law between preponderance of the...

Throughout the period 1871-1938, the average British worker was better off than the average German worker, but there were significant differences between major sectors. For the aggregate economy, the real wage gap was about the same as the labour productivity gap, but again there were important...

This paper investigates the impact of implicit institutions on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Implicit institutions are here defined as mindsets that have developed as the result of norms and traditions and we expect they will have an influence on risk attitudes and opportunity...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences. While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologists rather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suffer from distinct weaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in the...

The existing literature on inequality between private and public sectors focuses on cross-section differences in earnings levels. A more general way of looking at inequality between sectors is to recognize that forward-looking agents will care about income and job mobility too. We show that...

Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self employed. In the United States, however, rates of self employment among Mexican Americans are only 6 percent, about half the rate among non-Latino whites. Using data from the Mexican and U.S. population census, we show that neither industrial...