The diffusion of Temporary Work Agency (TWA) jobs originated a harsh policy debate and ambiguous empirical evidence. Results for the US, based on quasi-experimental evidence, suggest that a TWA assignment decreases the probability of finding a stable job, while results for Europe, based on the...

A bi-directional relationship between FDI and economic reforms in ten Central European countries is tested, along with the role of the EU in breaking a potential vicious circle of insecurity, little investment, slow reforms, low prospects of EU membership and hence high insecurity. Using panel...

It has become customary to estimate the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) with GMM using a large instrument set that includes lags of variables that are ad hoc to the model. Researchers have also conventionally used real unit labor cost (RULC) as the proxy for real marginal cost, even though...

Wage premia related to union membership and coverage are examined over 1991-2003, a period involving first decline, then stabilization, of unionization. Differences in union premia across workers and over time are studied using individual-level British Household Panel Survey data and quantile...

In this paper we analyze the trend of the gender gap between wives and husbands for Mediterranean countries with a strong family tradition, using data from the European Household Panel (ECHP) of 2001 and the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of 2006. In general, wives and...

Instrumental variables estimates of the effect of military service on subsequent civilian earnings either omit schooling or treat it as exogenous. In a more general setting that also allows for the treatment of schooling as endogenous, we estimate the veteran effect for men who were born between...

This paper focuses on the observed empirical relationship between fiscal rules and budget deficits, and examines whether this correlation is driven by an omitted variable, namely voter preferences. We make use of two different estimation methods to capture voter preferences in a panel of Swiss...

Current empirical growth models limit the determinants of country growth to geographic, economic, and institutional variables. This study draws on conflict variables from the Correlates of War (COW) project to ask a critical question: How do different types of conflict affect country growth...

Our paper addresses the correction of the aggregation bias in linear rational expectations models when there is some unobserved micro-parameter heterogeneity and only macro data are available. Starting from Lewbel (1994), we propose two new consistent estimators, which rely on a exible...