In this paper we present an overview of GDP and productivity growth patterns in OECD countries over the past decade, on the basis of harmonized data. Our evidence suggests that fast-growing countries generally shared three characteristics: improvements in labour utilization; a generalized...

This paper reviews the process of job creation and destruction across a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade. It exploits a harmonized firm-level data-set drawn from business registers and enterprise census data. The paper assesses the importance of technological...

This paper analyzes job flows in a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade, exploiting a harmonized firm-level dataset. It shows that industry and firm size effects (and especially firm size) account for a large fraction in the overall variability in job flows....

Liberalization and privatization have made the regulatory environment more market-friendly throughout the OECD. However using a large new dataset on product market regulation, we show that regulatory policies in OECD nations have become more dissimilar in relative terms, even as all nations have...

The segmentation of the labour market is one of the most striking characteristics of the transition process in Central and Eastern European countries. Not only do the young, unskilled workers and women face a high risk of unemployment, but joblessness also varies significantly geographically....

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...

The global economic crisis has hit youth very hard. In the OECD area, the youth (15-24) unemployment rate rose by 6 percentage points in the two years to the end of 2009, to reach almost 19%. There are currently nearly 15 million youth unemployed in the OECD area, about four million more than at...

In this note we document how constraints in the business environment, as perceived by individual firms, differ both across countries and within each country, across firms. This finding is of key importance given recent theoretical models that suggest idiosyncratic distortions can have large...

In this paper, we present evidence on how employers perceive labor regulations and react when these are perceived to constrain the operation of their firm. The paper draws from harmonized surveys of (up to) 17,000 firms around the world, and compares employers’ responses with actual labor...

In this paper we provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. We rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise surveys). The...