Using OECD data from 1970 until 1995, we estimate systems of labour force participation equations, disaggregated by age and sex, for the United States, Japan, France and Sweden. We simulate the path of participation rates following shocks to GDP and also test for asymmetric responses to shocks...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic in uences that give rise to cycles of di ering lengths and strengths. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ and develop frequency domain meth- ods that allow...

We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term goal of restoring full potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the...

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15% using the General Household Survey (GHS). Reanalysing this dataset, we find much smaller returns of...

We construct a two sector general equilibrium model in which one sector produces a homogeneous good and the other sector produces a vertically differentiated good. We demonstrate that uniform (across sectors) and (Hicks) neutral technologies change can cause an increase in the skill premium.