The eastern enlargement of the European Union in 2004 triggered a large flow of migrant workers from the new member states to the UK and Ireland. This paper analyzes the impact of this migration wave on the real wages in the source countries. I consider the case of Lithuania, which had the...

In this paper we examine the possible distributional impacts of new trade barriers associated with the new Trade and Cooperation Agreement governing relations between the UK and EU after Brexit. We use a model of labour demand that incorporates input-output links across industries, and that...

Unlike most countries, Korea did not implement a lockdown in its battle against COVID-19, instead successfully relying on testing and contact tracing. Only one region, Daegu-Gyeongbuk, had a significant number of infections, traced to a religious sect. This allows us to estimate the causal...

This paper aims at identifying the labour share (wage-productivity gap) as a major factor in the evolution of inequality and employment. To this end, we use annual data for the US, UK and Sweden over the past forty years and estimate country-specific systems of labour demand and Gini coefficient...

We unbox developments in artificial intelligence (AI) to estimate how exposure to these developments affect firm-level labour demand, using detailed register data from Denmark, Portugal and Sweden over two decades. Based on data on AI capabilities and occupational work content, We develop and...

We study earnings and income inequality in Britain over the 25 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on the middle 90% of the income distribution, within which the gap between top and bottom in 2019-20 was essentially the same as a quarter-century earlier. We show that this apparent...

This paper analyses deviations from full employment in EU countries, compared with the US and the UK. We apply the Beveridge (full-employment-consistent) rate of unemployment (BECRU), derived from the unemployment-vacancies relationship. The BECRU is the level of unemployment that minimises the...

This paper investigates the merger wave hypothesis for the US and the UK employing a Markov regime switching model. Using quarterly data covering the last thirty years, for the US, we identify the beginning of a merger wave in the mid 1990s but not the much-discussed 1980s merger wave. We argue...

Most macroeconomic data are uncertain - they are estimates rather than perfect measures of underlying economic variables. One symptom of that uncertainty is the propensity of statistical agencies to revise their estimates in the light of new information or methodological advances. This paper...