This paper examines whether the different macroeconomic performances of the German economy in two post-war decades provide evidence for the theory (first advanced by Mancur Olson) that sharp institutional breaks are conducive to economic growth because they destroy the existing network of...

The ‘new economy’ of the 1990s saw improving Phillips curve trade-offs coupled with faster productivity growth, particularly in the United States. This has led to a revival of the idea that there is an inverse relationship between productivity growth and the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate...

Wages may be observed to increase with seniority because of firm-specific human capital accumulation or because of self-selection of better workers in longer jobs. In both these cases the upward sloping wage profile in cross-sectional regressions would reflect higher productivity of more senior...

This paper analyses the Rubinstein bargaining game with random alternating offers when the firm has an inventory of finished goods. If the firm can sell out of that inventory during a strike, we show that the negotiated wage is a decreasing function of the inventory stock. Conversely, if the...

This paper shows that search in the labour market has important effects on accumulation decisions. In a labour market characterized by search, employment contracts are naturally incomplete and this creates a wedge between the rates of return and marginal products of both human and physical...

Several recent studies based on 'exogenous' sources of variation in education outcomes show Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates of returns to schooling that are substantially higher than the corresponding Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Card (1995a) suggests that these results can be...

An important component of the long-run cost of a war is the loss of human capital, suffered by children of schooling age who receive less education because of the war. This paper shows that in the European countries involved in World War II, children who were ten years old during the conflict...

This paper attempts to explain disparities among the unemployment experiences of different OECD countries in terms of the `fragility' of the short-run unemployment equilibrium (the impact of labour market shocks on the short-run unemployment rate) and the lag structure of the employment...

This paper examines the effects on wages and employment of the minimum wage in agriculture in the United Kingdom during the interwar period. We find that the impact of regulation was to raise the wage for agricultural labourers by 13% when it was (re)introduced in 1924, by 15% in the late 1920s,...

We use a rich personnel data set from a Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 to analyze how the financial crisis in 1998 and the resulting change in external labour market conditions affect the wages and the welfare of workers inside a firm. We provide evidence that large shocks to external...