This paper attempts to add to the understanding of the causes for the differing recent developments in inequality in OECD countries. The similarity of shocks and technological changes affecting these countries suggests that interactions of these shocks and countryspecific institutions are...

Advanced industrial democracies experience increasing inequalities or at least a new trade-off between equality and growth: liberal welfare states opted for growth and accepted rising inequality, while conservative welfare states tried to hold back inequality, thereby accepting lower growth, and...

The purpose of this study is to summarize and comment upon what we know about the determinants of both the level and trend in economic inequality over the past two decades, and to relate these findings to the progress of globalization in these nations. While the fruits of economic progress in...

The dissertation elaborates on topics that are related to (i) intergenerational transfers of wealth and to (ii) how government ideology and elections influence outcomes (income inequality and budget consolidation) and political processes (fiscal planning and policy advice). The dissertation...

The aim of this work is to investigate the role played by the so-called 'globalization' processes of the last couples of decades on the international patterns of technological learning and on the distribution of incomes and growth. First, we re-assess the evidence on the general patterns of the...

In this work, we present an assessment of the nature and impact of current globalizing tendencies at various levels of observation. The evidence in this respect suggests that it has mostly concerned financial flows (especially short-term ones); to some extent trade flows; and only to very...

We analyse the interactions between public and private sector wages per employee in OECD countries. We motivate the analysis with a dynamic labour market equilibrium model with search and matching frictions to study the effects of public sector employment and wages on the labour market,...

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...

In a recent paper I argued that Baumol's (1967) model of unbalanced growth offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in health care expenditure (HCE) in rich countries (HARTWIG 2006). Baumol's model implies that HCE is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth. I...