The eminent contributors (including Altshuler, Creedy, Freebairn, Gravelle, Heady, Kalb, Sørensen and Zodrow) investigate the beneficial directions for medium-term tax reform in the light of global developments and lessons from the latest taxation research. In addressing this issue, they review...

The responsiveness of housing supply to changes in prices bears important implications for the evolution of housing prices and the speed of adjustment of housing markets. Based on a stock-flow model of the housing market estimated within an error correction framework, this paper estimates the...

Industrial specialization has important implications for economic performance; therefore, understanding its determinants is of key policy relevance. This paper quantifies the relationship between factor endowments, policies and institutions and patterns of industrial specialisation in production...

This paper investigates the design of tax structures to promote economic growth. It suggests a “tax and growth” ranking of taxes, confirming results from earlier literature but providing a more detailed disaggregation of taxes. Corporate taxes are found to be most harmful for growth,...

This paper assesses if GDP per capita is an adequate proxy as a measure of wellbeing or whether other indicators are more suitable for this purpose. Within the national accounts framework, other better measures of economic resources exist, but they are closely correlated with GDP per capita and...

The centralised wage agreements have helped to contain inflation. There is evidence that wage increases were more moderate when a central agreement was concluded than in periods when no central agreement was reached. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that centralised wage setting has had some...

This paper breaks new ground by providing comparable estimates of intergenerational wage and education persistence across 14 European OECD countries based on a new micro data from Eurostat. A further novelty is that it examines the potential role of public policies and labour and product market...

All discussions about the desirability of policy reforms rest on judgements about their effects on individuals and societal well-being. Yet, suitable measures for assessing how well-being is changing over time or compares across countries are lacking. This problem is, of course, not new and...

This paper assesses recent patterns in intergenerational social mobility across OECD countries and examines the role that public policies can play in affecting such mobility. It shows that the relationship between parental or socio-economic background and offspring’s educational and wage...