How Important Are Labor Market Institutions for Labor Market Performance in Transition Countries? This paper offers a first comprehensive study of the relationship between labor market institutions and policies and labor market performance in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which in the last two decades experienced radical economic and institutional transformations. Based on a...

Female Labor Market Transitions in Europe Using micro panel data, labor market transitions are analyzed for the EU-member states by cumulative year-by-year transition probabilities. As female (non-)employment patterns changed more dramatically than male employment in past decades, the analyses mainly refer to female labor supply. In search for important determinants of these transitions, six EU...

Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial decisions. First, we test the hypothesis that marriage represents in a portfolio framework a sort of safe asset, and that this effect is stronger for women. Controlling for a number of observable characteristics, we show that single women have a lower propensity to invest in...

The absence of repeated direct measures of job skill requirements, such as a fully updated edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), creates problems for anyone interested in understanding whether, how much, and how fast the demand for cognitive skills in the workplace has grown over time. Many studies have merged cross-sectional skill scores for detailed occupations from the DOT ...

The Effect of Enclave Residence on the Labour Force Activities of Immigrants in Canada It has been well documented that immigrants’ clustering of residence in large cities has been associated with the creation of a number of ethnic enclaves. The intensive exposure to ownethnic population could affect immigrant labour market involvement positively or negatively. However, no extant Canadian resea...

Jump-Starting Self-Employment? Evidence among Welfare Participants in Argentina One important concern of governments in developing countries is on how to phase-out large safety nets programs. This paper evaluates the short run effects of one possible exit strategy, programs that promote self-employment, in Argentina. We provide evidence that a small fraction of beneficiaries were attracted by t...

A Search Model of Discouragement Discouragement is a process occurring during an unemployment spell. As the spell prolongs, an individual gradually realises that the returns to search can no longer outweigh search costs, and hence she may eventually leave the labour force. This is analysed theoretically in a framework of unemployed search. We construct a search model, which is stationary from t...

The paper presents the results from a CGE model of interactions between public and private health care, outputs of non-health goods and national welfare in a small open economy applied to the UK. The effects on welfare of higher provision come through direct gains, affecting the well-being of households, and indirectly, through increases in the effective (i.e. ‘able to work’) endowments of skil...

How Did the Great Recession Affect Different Types of Workers? Evidence from 17 Middle-Income Countries This paper examines how different types of workers in 17 middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Impacts on different types of workers varied by country and were only weakly related to the severity of the shock. Among active workers, yout...

 Most debates about the role of tariff cuts on the level of employment and rate of wages in labor market have come out of well-known Hecscher – Ohlin and Stopler – Samuelson (HOS) theorems. Considering the fact that we have divided the workforce into skilled and unskilled labors the present paper assesses the impacts of tariff cuts on labor market indicators in Iran. To address these issues...