This paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the US over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand-supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained. Finally,...

This paper tries to assess how costly it would be for the CEECs to peg their exchange rates to the Euro. We use three types of criteria: institutional (the Maastricht criteria); some measure of real convergence; and the Optimal Currency Area criteria. The institutional criteria seem to be an...

Economic and monetary reunification in Germany has proved to be more expensive than previously thought - and not just for the Germans. If a `Mezzogiorno' problem of continuing fiscal transfers to the East and possible migration flows westwards are to be avoided, there must be convergence in...

Whereas existing literature has documented strong correlations between national incomes and measures of schooling attainment, causality has been hard to pin down. Much of empirical work had tended to interpret these correlations as implying an effect of human capital on national income, but...

The measurement of national income has added greatly to our understanding of economic and social change in Europe over the past hundred years. But national income analysis does not take full account of changes in welfare and particularly of the causes and effects of long-term changes in the...

We study the evolution of an educational system which is founded on a hierarchical differentiation between technical and general education, with a superior social status attached to general. The resulting dynamic political equilibrium is best summarized by the ratio of vocational to general...

This paper models technology adoption as replacing workers by machines, which perform the same job in the production process. The paper shows that such modelling of technology adoption affects significantly the analysis of economic growth. This model can explain large and persistent...

This Paper examines the process of development from an epoch of Malthusian stagnation to a state of sustained economic growth. The analysis focuses on recently advanced unified growth theories that capture the intricate evolution of income per capita, technology, and population over the course...

This paper considers the distributional consequences of the reform programme in Russia. Although a small fraction of the population have gained under the reforms, average real household per capita income has declined significantly with households at the lower end of the income distribution...