In recent years wages in China have been rising and the yuan has appreciated, potentially eroding China's cost advantage in manufactures. This paper explores the evolution of China's relative unit labor costs in manufacturing over 1998-2009. Between 1998 and 2003 China's unit labor costs fell,...

Over the past decades, models of circular and cumulative causation, based on the endogenous relations between prices, exports, and labour productivity, have lost prominence in explaining economic dynamics. We argue that, in the absence of counterbalancing mechanisms, the combination of...

The path breaking work of Card and Krueger (1993), showing higher minimum wage can increase employment turned the age-old conventional wisdom on its head. This paper demonstrates that this apparently paradoxical result is perfectly plausible in a competitive general equilibrium production...

Das deutsche Verarbeitende Gewerbe hat im internationalen Vergleich ein hohes Lohnstückkostenniveau. Im Durchschnitt waren die deutschen Lohnstückkosten im Jahr 2018 um 15 Prozent höher als in den 27 Vergleichsländern. Der Kostennachteil Deutschlands gegenüber dem Euroraum belief sich auf 9...

Understanding why certain jobs are ‘better’ than others and what implications they have for a worker’s career is clearly an important but still relatively unexplored question. We provide both a theoretical frame-work and a number of empirical results that help distinguishing ‘good’...

Understanding why certain jobs are 'better' than others and what implications they have for a worker's career is clearly an important but still relatively unexplored question. We provide both a theoretical framework and a number of empirical results that help distinguishing 'good' from 'bad'...

This study explores the determinants of sectoral wage dynamics in Croatia, including intersectoral wage linkages. Wage formation in the exporting sectors receives particular focus. Exporters are found to be wage leaders and labor productivity is a more important wage determinant for exporting...

Intuitively, by increasing the opportunity cost of engaging in criminal activities, positive economic shocks should reduce crime. However, the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic shocks and criminal behavior is at best ambiguous. This may be because certain types of shocks...

Corporate tax avoidance has regularly been accused of aggravating income inequalities. Yet, systematic evidence on this matter is still lacking. To fill this gap, the present paper explores the effect of profit shifting on employee pay among S&P 1500 companies. The study shows that its effect...

Im Durchschnitt waren die deutschen Lohnstückkosten 2021 um 13 Prozent höher als in den 27 Ländern des IW-Vergleichs und um 8 Prozent höher als im Euro-Ausland. Die hierzulande überdurchschnittlich hohe Produktivität der Industrie reichte nicht aus, um den Nachteil der hohen Arbeitskosten...