This econometric analysis investigates the impact of changes in sectoral valueadded prices and total factor productivity (TFP) on the equilibrium relative wage of low-skilled workers in eleven high-income countries. The key finding is that TFP growth mandated an increase in the unskilled wage,...

Based on Baumol’s cost-disease model, we develop two alternative measures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Both productivity measures are based on changes in the relative price of schooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schooling has increased faster in...

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low-wage sending regions (directly augmenting the supply of potential movers as well as indirectly making already-measured...

Trade unions are consistently found to compress the wage distribution. Moreover, unemployment affects in particular low-skilled workers. The present paper argues that an extended Right-to-Manage model can account for both of these findings. In this model unions compress the wage distribution by...

Tax competition is much discussed in the political arena these days. Although it is not a new phenomenon, the political pressure has increased to restrict tax competition by intensifying tax coordination and accomplishing tax harmonization. This particularly holds for the EU which has...

This paper examines the effect of government ideology on monetary policy in a quarterly data set of 15 OECD countries in the period 1980.1-2005.4. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant indicator for central bank independence and government ideology. The...

This paper examines the interactions between money, consumer prices and commodity prices at a global level from 1970 to 2008. Using aggregated data for major OECD countries and a cointegrating VAR framework, we are able to establish long run and short run relationships among these variables...

Casual empiricism suggests that unwarranted" wage changes, defined as the part of wage growth that is not explained by changes in labour productivity, are negatively associated with the return on capital. The main point of this paper is to show that unwarranted" wage changes have no causal...