Market work per person of working age differs widely across the OECD countries and there have been some significant changes in the last forty years. How to explain this pattern? Taxes are part of the story but much remains to be explained. If we include all the elements of the social security...

Inactivity rates among prime-age men in the UK have risen by at least five times since the early 1970s whereas unemployment rates are much the same. Furthermore, inactivity is strongly concentrated among the unskilled and those suffering from a limiting long-term illness or disability. In our...

Sixteen years into the transition, the problem of high joblessness has not been solved. Of the three explanations commonly discussed (i.e. ongoing reallocation; finished reallocation with redundant labour; wrong choice of institutional framework), we concentrated on the ongoing reallocation...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the...

Barely a day goes by without some expert telling us how the continental European economies are about to disintegrate unless their labour markets become more flexible. Basically, we are told, Europe has the wrong sort of labour market institutions for the modern global economy. These outdated...

Our conclusions are the most important influences on unemployment come from the following (i) The longer unemployment benefits are available the longer unemployment lasts. Similarly, higher levels of benefits generate higher unemployment, with an elasticity of around one half. On the other hand...

This paper studies the dynamics of labour demand and the determinants of employment rates across the OECD. We find: (i) labour demand adjusts less rapidly when employment protection is more strict and union density is higher; (ii) there is no evidence that overall job turnover is influenced by...

Over the period since 1970, Britain has improved its relative productivity performance, but there remains a significant gap in market sector productivity between Britain and both Continental Europe and the United States. Much of the gap between Britain and Continental Europe is due to lower...

This paper analyses time series data on some 800 British manufacturing companies to address various questions concerning the role of insiders and market power in wage determination. The following are the important results. First, firm specific factors such as productivity gains do influence wage...

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the hypothesis that increased R&D expenditure by companies generates a subsequent increase in fixed capital investment both within the same companies and in the companies which they supply. We use an investment framework which involves modelling...