At a time of rising cost of living, wide wage inequalities and widespread in-work poverty, the demand for a living wage has heightened. This Policy Insights introduces and contextualises the concept of a living wage. It also highlights the key measurement assumptions and criteria that underlie...

This paper investigates the impact of a collective agreement stipulating a one shot increase in establishment-specific wage levels in a public-sector setting where wages otherwise are set according to individualized wage bargaining. The agreement stipulated that wages should increase in...

We study how workers' wages respond to TFP-driven innovations in firms' labor productivity. Using unique data with highly reliable firm-level output prices and quantities in the manufacturing sector in Sweden, we are able to derive measures of physical (as opposed to revenue) TFP to instrument...

Selon de nombreuses recherches, il semble que les immigrants plus qualifiés, en particulier dans les domaines des sciences, de la technologie, de l’ingénierie et des mathématiques, sont non seulement plus innovateurs que leurs collègues nés au pays qui les a reçus, mais qu’ils ont...

We compare literacy test scores and relative wage and employment outcomes of Australian, Canadian and U.S. immigrants using the 2003/2006 Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALLS). We find substantially higher immigrant skill levels at the lower end of the distribution in Australia,...

A growing body of research suggests that skilled immigrants, particularly those in the “STEM†fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), are not only more innovative than their native-born counterparts but also have the potential to produce positive productivity...

Research comparing the labour market performance of recent cohorts of immigrants to Australia and Canada points to superior employment and earnings outcomes in Australia. Examining Australian and Canadian Census data between 1986 and 2006, we find that this performance advantage is not driven by...

This paper considers the effects of union-bargained minimum wages on transitions into and out of employment in the hotels and catering industry over the period 1979–99. This industry is characterised by a high fraction of unskilled labour input, high worker turnover and binding minimum wages....

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...

This paper proposes a new framework to empirically assess the effects of the minimum wage in a developing country. This approach allows us to jointly estimate the effects of the minimum wage on unemployment, average wages, sector mobility, wage inequality, the size of the informal sector and on...