This paper discusses links between policy settings, institutions and economic growth in OECD countries on the basis of pooled cross-country time-series regressions. The novel econometric approach used in the paper allows short-term adjustments and convergence speeds to vary across countries, in...

There is no or limited consensus on the quantitative impact of institutions on unemployment, which has led some to question the case for structural reforms. Recent studies suggest also that institutions interact with each other and cannot be analysed in isolation. In this paper, we estimate a...

This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on unemployment in OECD countries over the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/price-setting models, are estimated using cross-country/time-series data from 21 OECD countries over the...

The information society is all very well, but the trouble is ensuring everyone can be trained up for it, especially those who need it most. Countries still do not appear to invest enough in the education of under-skilled adults, although the extent of the problem is difficult to quantify and may...

Data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) are used to assess the effects of employee training on the average wage and employment security of different labour market groups in EU countries. Significant training wage premia are found only in the case of young or highly educated...

Different training policies can serve different objectives. Institutional arrangements to foster cost-sharing can efficiently increase access to formal, accredited and well-recognised training with little burden for the public budget. Co-financing policies that increase the incentive for firms...

The economic performance of some OECD countries over the past decade, most notably the United States, has renewed the interest of analysts and policy makers on economic growth and on how policy can eventually support it. This report sheds some light on this issue by relying on harmonised macro...

Past research shows that training opportunities are unequally distributed across workers, with workers who are already in a better position in the labour market having more opportunities to acquire new skills. We decompose the downstream training market in order to trace the extent to which...

Empirically the diffusion of competing technologies most often displays either "lock-in" to a quasi-monopoly or apparent turbulence but rarely stable market-sharing. In contrast with widespread views, we show that, first, unbounded increasing returns are neither necessary nor sufficient to lead...

Despite some progress, there is still evidence of discrimination on the grounds of gender and ethnic or racial origins in OECD labour markets. Field experiments show pervasive ethnic discrimination in many countries. We show indirect cross-country/time-series evidence that, using product market...