In a path-breaking but largely overlooked study, published in a festchrift thirty years ago (1975), Herman Van der Wee provided a comparison of prices and real wages of building craftsmen in the regions of Antwerp and south-eastern England, from 1400 to 1700. To do so, he constructed a composite...

The demographic and education composition of European countries is changing: the population share of young individuals is declining while that of the highly educated is rising. This study estimates the impact of cohort size on wages using data on several European countries to cast light on the...

Will the projected decline in the youth share of European countries' populations alleviate the currently high levels of youth unemployment in Europe? Economic theory predicts that in the absence of perfectly competitive labour markets, changes in the relative size of age groups will cause...

This paper presents a description of the Brazilian public employment trend since the middle of the twentieth century. Its objective is to stress the causes of the increasing in public employment levels and also its role to the Brazilian labor market transformations since then. In this paper,...

The demographic and education composition of European countries is changing: the population share of young individuals is declining while that of the highly educated is rising. This paper estimates the impact of cohort size on wages using data on 21 European countries covering 2007-2010 to cast...

Using data from 49 European regions covering 2005-2012, this paper finds that the estimated effect of cohort size on employment and unemployment outcomes is very sensitive to the age range of the sample. We argue that this is because the identification strategy commonly used in this literature...

Youth unemployment and underemployment are serious concerns in sub-Saharan Africa, especially given the region's young population. The barriers young people face stem both from skills deficiencies and from weak fundamentals that constrain job creation more generally in the region. Employment...

Labour force participation is a topical issue in New Zealand. It is well known that the participation of New Zealand women aged 25-39 is low in comparison with women in other OECD countries. There has been considerable interest in policies which might raise women's participation. This paper...

This paper explores five main questions regarding the gender distribution of work, primarily in the context of couples with young children. These are: how much total paid and unpaid work is carried out in New Zealand?; how is this work shared between women and men?; how does this compare with...