Empirical evidence seems to indicate that economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with natural resource abundance across countries. This Paper proposes a linkage between abundant natural resources and economic growth, through saving and investment. When the share of output that accrues...

This Paper provides microfoundations for wage compression by modelling wage-setting in a world of heterogeneous workers and firms. Workers are differentiated by observable innate ability. A high-ability worker confers on a firm an externality, since their ability raises the average level of...

This paper estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-1995. We find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. We use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the two tails of...

This paper looks at changes in the distribution of unemployment across education groups in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US. The rate of unemployment among the less educated is higher than among those with more education in all the countries, with the exception of Italy....

Using data for the years 1991-96 from the British Household Panel Survey, the authors investigate how union coverage affected work-related training and how the union-training link affected wages and wage growth for a sample of full-time men. Relative to non-covered workers, union-covered workers...

This article estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-95. The authors find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. They use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the...

Is it possible that relying too heavily on natural resources affects saving and investment in a way that hampers economic growth? – and thus, in the long run, the level of output per capita. This paper reviews the literature, explores the data and compares and contrasts the explanatory power...

The move to a pay-as-you-earn income tax system in Iceland in 1987-1988 made income earned in 1987 tax-free. Using a sample of 9,274 individuals for the years 1986, 1987 and 1988, we calculate the labour-supply response of this change and find that total labour supply rose by 6.7% in 1987 over...

We investigate two dimensions of investment in general human capital on-the-job: the number of workers trained and the intensity of training for each worker. In the benchmark case, we consider wage and training decisions made by firms in an imperfectly competitive labour market. The benchmark...

This paper uses county-level data to estimate the timing and magnitude of shifts in aggregate and regional British Beveridge curves. We find that these shifts coincide with the business cycle rather than with hysteresis effects or with changes in regional mismatch. This implies that the...