In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating...

Environmental policies may have important consequences for firms' competitiveness or profit-ability. However, the empirical literature shows that hardly any statistically significant effects on firms can be detected for the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). We explain why there...

High levels of employment protection reduce hiring and firing and have a theoretically ambiguous effect on the employment level. Immigrants, being new to the labor market, may be less aware of employment protection regulations and less likely to claim their rights, which may create a gap between...

This paper focuses on the euro area wage structure and its potential determinants from a sectoral viewpoint. Merging information from the OECD Structural Analysis database with data from the EU Labour Force Survey, we construct a cross-country panel of 22 industries in 8 euro area countries for...

The numbers of migrants from the accessions countries have clearly increased since the enlargement of the EU in 2004. Following enlargement, the net inflow of EU8 immigrants has become 2.5 times larger than the four-year period before enlargement. Poles constitute the largest immigrant group...

Using longitudinal data on individuals from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for eight countries during 1995-2001, I investigate temporary job contract duration and job search effort. The countries are Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. I...

This paper analyses the dynamic structure of individual earnings across 14 EU countries over the period 1994-2001 using ECHP. Understanding wage mobility and its link with the evolution of cross-sectional earnings inequality is important from a welfare perspective, particularly given the large...

This paper outlines the importance of labor mobility for the improvement in allocating and distributing economic resources. We are faced with an increasing lack of skilled workers and a growing tendency of unemployment amongst the low-skilled. A central political objective for the future will...

Parents in the labor force have balance their work and home life, including the choice of the type of care to provide for their children while they work. In this paper we study the connection between the married women's labor force participation, child care arrangements and the time that...

In this paper we analyze the trend of the gender gap between wives and husbands for Mediterranean countries with a strong family tradition, using data from the European Household Panel (ECHP) of 2001 and the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of 2006. In general, wives and...