According to recent and largely untested theories, unemployment benefits (UBs) could improve the extent and quality of job reallocation even at the cost of increasing unemployment. Using yearly panel data from a large number of countries, we evaluate empirically the relationship between...

Standard models of equilibrium unemployment assume exogenous labour market institutions and flexible wage determination. This paper models wage rigidity and collective bargaining endogenously, when workers differ by observable skill and may adopt either individualized or collective wage...

National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on...

This paper documents some of the patterns in modern microeconomic data on youngpeople´s employment, attitudes and entrepreneurial behaviour. Among other sources, thepaper uses the Eurobarometer Surveys; the Labour Force Surveys from Canada and theCurrent Population Survey in the United States...

In this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980sin the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper relating to the UK.Data on random samples of twenty million US workers are examined taken from the BasicMonthly files of the CPS...

This paper draws attention to an increase in the size of the union membership wage premiumin the UK public sector relative to the private sector. We find the public sector membershipwage premium is approximately double that in the private sector controlling for a full range ofindividual, job and...

This paper examines the causes and consequences of changes in the incidence ofentrepreneurship in the UK. Self-employment as a proportion of total employment is high byinternational standards in the United Kingdom, but the share has fluctuated over time. Weexamine the time series movements in...

Report based on a study conducted for the European Parliament, Bonn 2013 (142 pages)