The impact of imports from low-wage countries on domestic labor market outcomes has been a hotly debated issue for decades. The recent surge in imports from China has reignited this debate. Since the 1980s several developed economies have experienced contemporaneous increases in the volume of...

This paper studies how decentralization of wage bargaining from sector to firm-level influences wage levels and wage dispersion. We use detailed panel data covering a period of decentralization in the Danish labor market. The decentralization process provides variation in the individual worker's...

While most countries welcome (and some even subsidise) high-skilled immigrants, there is very limited evidence of their importance for domestic firms. To guide our empirical analysis, we first set up a simple theoretical model to show how foreign experts may impact on the productivity and wages...

Many developed countries have recently experienced a significant inflow of immigrants in the agricultural sector. At the same time, the sector is still in a process of structural transformation resulting in fewer but bigger and presumably more efficient farms. In this paper, we exploit detailed...

This paper presents an evaluation of the tax-transfer treatment of married couples in 15 EU countries using the EUROMOD microsimulation model. First, we show that many tax-transfer schemes in Europe feature negative jointness defined as a situation where the tax rate on one person depends...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...

Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which...

As evidence is accumulating that subjective expectations influence behavior and that these expectations are sometimes biased, it becomes policy-relevant to know how to influence individuals' expectations. Information in the media is likely to affect how people picture the future. This paper...

For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empirical research showing how productivity is affected by age. I study age effects at the individual level by analyzing data on running and publishing in economic journals. Furthermore...

This paper provides evidence about the quality of retrospective childhood health histories given to respondents in the HRS and the PSID. Even though information on early life health events is critical, there is legitimate skepticism about the ability of older respondents to remember specific...