A number of recent studies have documented extensive downward nominal wage rigidity (dnwr) for job stayers in many oecd countries. However, dnwr for individual workers may induce downward rigidity or 'a floor' for the aggregate wage growth at positive or negative levels. Aggregate wage growth...

Past empirical failures of the basic Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) model related to the inability of data to meet its restrictive assumptions, particularly identical international technologies and factor price equalization. Trefler (1993) tried to resuscitate HOV by introducing a simple...

We study differences in the adjustment of aggregate real wages in the manufacturing sector over the business cycle across OECD countries, combining results from different data and dynamic methods. Summary measures of cyclicality show genuine cross-country heterogeneity even after controlling for...

Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, we analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in an another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. Our...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

This paper considers forecast averaging when the same model is used but estimation is carried out over different estimation windows. It develops theoretical results for random walks when their drift and/or volatility are subject to one or more structural breaks. It is shown that compared to...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...

Using data from 1960-2000 for OECD countries, we analyze the impact of compulsory military service on the demand for higher education, measured by students enrolled in tertiary education as a share of the working-age population. Based on a theoretical model, we hypothesize that military draft...

Data show that better creditor protection is correlated across countries with lower average stock market volatility. Moreover, countries with better creditor protection seem to have suffered lower decline in their stock market indexes during the current financial crisis. To explain this...

This paper considers a simple model of self-fulfilling expectations that leads to a multiple equilibrium of gender gaps in wages and participation rates. Rather than resorting to moral hazard problems related to unobservable effort, like in most of the related literature, our model fully relies...