This paper examines how the extension of collective wage bargaining agreements to non-unionized firms affects unemployment. Testing a large number of econometric specifications on data from 15 OECD countries observed between 1965 and 2007, we find a positive, significant and robust interaction...

There is widespread evidence that a better access to markets contributes to raising income levels. However, no quantification of the impact of distance to markets has been made on the basis of a sample restricted to advanced - and therefore more homogeneous - countries. This paper applies the...

This paper examines how much of the dispersion in economic performance across OECD countries can be accounted for by economic geography factors. More specifically, two aspects of economic geography are examined, namely the proximity to areas of dense economic activity and endowments in natural...

This paper provides, for all OECD countries, an estimate of the net tax cost per currency unit of contribution to a tax-favoured retirement savings plan, using a present-value methodology. The latter takes into account the future flows of revenues foregone on accrued income and of revenues...

In contrast to what has happened throughout the 1960s and 1970s, some of the largest EU countries and Japan are no longer closing the income gap vis-a-vis the United States. Worse, the gap may even be widenining since the mid-1990s. While in the case of Japan the gap in GDP per capita is...

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of...

This article applies for the first time the framework developed by Redding and Venables (Journal of International Economics, 62: 53-82) on a panel dataset restricted to advanced countries over 1970-2004, and shows that the cost of remoteness remains significant. Second, the article highlights...