Smoother labor incomes alleviate credit constraints by reducing workers' desire to borrow, and prospects of upward income mobility have smaller beneficial effects for currently poor workers when borrowing constraints are binding. These simple theoretical insights are consistent with the...

Recent migration patterns show growing migration pressure and changing composition of immigrants in many Western countries. During the latest decade, an increasing proportion of the OECD immigrants have been from poor countries, where the educational level of the population is low. The migration...

This paper compares models used to explain OECD unemployment. The models suggest that the ?natural rate of unemployment? has been driven up mainly by wage push factors. Panel data on twenty-two OECD countries are used to investigate the explanatory power of these models over the past two...

This paper shows that employment protection is influenced by the male breadwinner conception which is itself shaped by religions. First, by using international individual surveys, we document that Catholics, Muslims and Orthodoxs are more likely to support such "macho values" than Protestants...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

In this paper we investigate the importance of labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance, unions, firing regulation and minimum wages for the evolution of wage inequality across countries. We derive a simple log-linear equation of the wage differential as a function of the...

Data on educational access show gender parity of pupils attending primary and secondary schools in transition countries. The first aim of this analysis is to examine whether the gender balance in educational access translates also into gender equality in educational achievement. There are...

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of different types of active labor market policies (ALMP). In our empirical analysis we use data on 20 OECD countries covering the time period 1985-1999. We find that labor market training is the most effective program to bring down unemployment....

We show that a stronger earnings relationship of unemployment compensation reduces wages and increases employment in an economy in which wages are determined by a trade union that maximises the rent from unionisation. The opposite result applies for a utilitarian union. Using manufacturing and...

This paper uses data from 20 OECD countries to investigate the impact of welfare state institutions (especially employment protection, wage bargaining and work incentives) on the functioning of the labour market both theoretically and empirically. It shows that the impact of welfare state...