We use a panel of 20 OECD countries over a 30-year period to estimate the implications of international capital mobility for unemployment. We find that the increase in capital flows since the mid1980s has contributed to an amplification of the impulse response of unemployment to country-specific...

We consider the potential importance of labour market efficiency for aggregate growth. The idea is that efficient labour markets move workers more quickly from low to high productivity sites, thereby raising aggregate productivity growth. We define a measure of labour market efficiency as a...

Contingency formulations of Human Resource Management (HRM) theory suggest thatthe effectiveness of HRM practices should vary across firms. This study examinedwhether the relationship between HRM practices and productivity in manufacturingcompanies is contingent upon organizational climate and...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signalsabout labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity,(polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of...

There is widespread concern currently that some ethnic minority communities within Britain, especially Muslim, are not following the stereotypical immigrant path of economic and cultural assimilation into British society. Indeed, many seem to have the impression that differences between Muslims...

We study the role of employment protection legislation (EPL) in determining firm size distribution. In manycountries the provisions of EPL are more stringent for firms above certain size thresholds. We construct asimple model that shows that the smooth relation between size and growth...

We estimate the harm from smoking during pregnancy upon child birth outcomes, using a rich dataset on a cohort of mothers and their births. We exploit a fixed effects approach to disentangle the correlation between smoking and birth weight from the causal effect. We find that, despite a detailed...

Although there is a large literature on the economic effects of minimum wages on labour market outcomes (especially employment), there is hardly any evidence on their impact on firm performance. This is surprising: minimum wages appear to have a significant impact on wages, but only a limited...

This paper studies the effects of firing taxes on the job destruction rate, when probationperiod - or temporary contract - policies are implemented in an otherwise exogenous jobseparation search model. It is shown that contrary to conventional wisdom, firing taxescan amplify the job turnover...

A striking fact about prices is the prevalence of ``sales': large temporary price cuts followed by a return exactly to the former price. This paper builds a macroeconomic model with a rationale for sales based on firms facing consumers with different price sensitivities. Even if firms can vary...