This paper studies the effect of financial booms and extreme asset valuations on the relative demand for skills and the wage structure. The substantial rise in wage inequality in the U.S. since the late 1970s has been accompanied by a major expansion of financial services, a series of asset...

This paper presents estimates based on individual data of downward nominal and real wage rigidities for 13 sectors in Belgium, Denmark, Spain, and Portugal. Our methodology follows the approach recently developed for the International Wage Flexibility Project, whereby resistance to nominal and...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic relevance of new findings regarding nominal wage stickiness, wage indexation, wage staggering and synchronisation, and downward nominal and real wage rigidity in the euro area. Quantifying the relevance of this evidence for monetary policy remains to be...

Based on an ad hoc firm-level survey on wage and pricing policies conducted in a large number of European countries, this study finds that about 60% of firms change base wages once a year with some clustering of wage changes observed in January. Differences in the frequency of wage changes...

In recent research, we have proposed a new framework for examining the determinants of income inequality, which emphasizes firm and worker heterogeneity and selection into export markets. In this paper, we use our framework to examine how wage inequality and unemployment vary across workers with...

This paper examines the precise links between foreign direct investment (henceforth, FDI) and poverty alleviation, where so far there are few studies attempted to analyze empirically this relationship. The FDI inflows vary across international borders, therefore FDI reduces poverty only under...

This paper studies the relationship between labor market institutions and policies and labor market performance using a new and unique dataset that covers the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which in the last two decades experienced radical economic and institutional...

This paper shows that in the UK, increases in unemployment in a recession are driven by rises in the separation rate. A new decomposition of unemployment dynamics is devised that does not require unemployment to be in steady state at all times. This is important because low UK transition rates...

The global downturn is now strongly affecting EU labour markets. In light of the downward revision to the growth projections and the uncertainty created by the financial meltdown, the outlook for employment has deteriorated considerably. This would also be consistent with the experience from...

We propose a theory of low-frequency movements in unemployment based on asymmetric real wage rigidities. The theory generates two main predictions: long-run unemployment increases with (i) a fall in long-run productivity growth and (ii) a rise in the variance of productivity growth. Evidence...