This paper estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-1995. We find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. We use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the two tails of...

This paper looks at changes in the distribution of unemployment across education groups in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US. The rate of unemployment among the less educated is higher than among those with more education in all the countries, with the exception of Italy....

A recent finding in the training literature is that there will be underinvestment in skills if there is a positive quit rate, training is at least partially transferable, and there is imperfect competition in the labor market. The authors explore the conditions under which this underinvestment...

This article estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-95. The authors find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. They use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the...

Education has been one of the key determinants of economic growth around the world since 1965. In this paper, we discuss three different measures of education, and consider their relationship to the distribution of income as measured by the Gini coefficient as well as to economic growth across...

Estimates of the natural rate of unemployment are important in many macroeconomic models used by economists and policy advisors. This paper shows how such estimates might benefit from closer attention to regional developments. Regional business cycles do not move in lockstep, and greater...

In recent contributions, Acemoglu and Pischke argue that wage compression induces firms to invest in general training. However, they consider only absolute wage compression. We extend their approach to consider relative wage compression and argue that wage compression as generally understood in...

Empirical evidence seems to indicate that economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with natural resource abundance across countries. This paper proposes a linkage between abundant natural resources and economic growth, through saving and investment. When the share of output that accrues...