The average unemployment rate in Europe has been consistently higher than in the United States since 1980. The main explanation offered by a rather large economics literature focuses on the interaction between institutions and shocks. The contribution of this paper is twofold: to assess whether...

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we survey the way in which the tax burden on labour has been proxied for in recent multi-country macro-economic studies. Second, we criticalyy evaluate these proxies. Finally, we examine to what extent the conclusions of some studies change if some...