This paper examines wage setting mechanisms for health workers in hospitals across eight different OECD countries. It describes similarities and differences and how fixed or fluid these approaches have been in recent years through health system reforms, labour market dynamics and economic...

Doctors are distributed unequally across different regions in virtually all OECD countries, and this causes concern about how to continue to ensure access to health services everywhere. In particular access to services in rural regions is the focus of attention of policymakers, although in some...

We examine the determinants of the within-industry decline of the labour share, using industry-level annual data for 25 OECD countries, 20 business-sector industries and covering up to 28 years. We find that total factor productivity growth – which captures (albeit imprecisely)...

I examine the effect of labour market policies and institutions on the transmission of macroeconomic shocks to the labour market, using both aggregate and industry-level annual data for 23 OECD countries, 23 business-sector industries and up to 29 years. I find that high and progressive labour...

Nurses are usually the most numerous professionals in the healthcare workforce, and their contribution is a core component in attaining the policy objectives of improved productivity, quality of care and effectiveness in the health sector. The recent global economic crisis, and its related...

This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on employment and unemployment of OECD countries in the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/pricesetting models, are estimated using cross-country/time-series data from 21 OECD...

The impact of four labour market policies – employment protection legislation, minimum wages, parental leave and unemployment benefits – on productivity is examined here, using annual cross-country aggregate data on these policies and industry-level data on productivity from 1979 to 2003. We...

According to Becker [1964], when labour markets are perfectly competitive, general training is paid by the worker, who reaps all the benefits from the investment. Therefore, ceteris paribus, the greater the training wage premium, the greater the investment in general training. Using data from...

There is little cross-country comparative evidence on the way labour market institutions shape gross job and worker flows, by and large because comparable data for many countries are scarce. By using a unique harmonised dataset on hirings and separations at the industry-level for a large...

The UK has a population of 56 million, and most healthcare is delivered through the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS employs more than one million staff. In the late 1990s shortages of skilled staff were a main obstacle to improving services in the NHS. The response by government was to...