Part of a long-run project to put together a systematic database of prices and wages for the American contingents, this paper takes a first look at standards of living in a series of North American and Latin American cities.  From secondary sources we collected price data that - with diverse...

The instability of the Beveridge curve in Britain since the mid-50s has been interpreted as revealing a deterioration of labour market effectiveness in matching vacancies to unemployed job-seekers. This paper attemps to repeat the stability analysis of the matching technology, having relaxed...

This paper is a preliminary draft of a chapter for the new Handbook of Labour Economics edited by Orley Ashenfelter and David Card and Published by North Holland.

Given the increasing use of panel data in testing hypotheses about labour market behaviour, it is essential that economists have a cound grasp of the problems involved in the collection of this type of data. This paper investigates the biases generated by recall errors and panel attrition, using...

In this paper, we first present a summary of the literature dealing with the question of the existence of externalities of employer provided and funded training. Using French data, we then estimate the impact of this kind of training on wages, while paying special attention to the mobility after...

The paper examines the contentious issue of the extent of surplus labour that remains in China.  China was an extreme example of a surplus labour economy, but the rapid economic growth during the period of economic reform requires a reassessment of whether the second stage of the Lewis model...

The paper attempts to synthesize the research to date on the contribution of international trade to rising income inequality in the US and to other labour-market developments in other countries. Our basic conclusion is that despite using very different methodologies, on balance most labour and...

We study the role of preferences in the process of unemployment benefit determination. Perhaps surprisingly, survey evidence for the UK suggests that both the employed and unemployed wish to see a more generous level of unemployment benefits.

We present a simple model where unemployment benefits are determined in an economy in which there is endogenous delay in finding a job so that workers desire insurance against the possibility of unemployment.