This paper explores how much firm-paid employee benefits and firms’ financial conditions have contributed to delayed employment recoveries relative to output since 1990, using a DSGE model. Empirically, I document the underexplored pro-cyclicality of per worker benefit costs. Post-1990 period differs from before in that: (1) there have been larger increases of such quasifixed employment costs a...

This paper discusses some recent advances in the area of culture and economics and examines the effect of culture on a key economic outcome: female labor supply. To separate the effect of market variables and institutions from culture, I use an epidemiological approach, studying second-generation American women. I use both female labor force participation (LFP) and attitudes in the women’s coun...

Workers’ Views of the Impact of Trade on Jobs Although public policy is influenced by the perception that workers worry about the impact of trade on their jobs, there is little empirical evidence on what shapes such views. This paper uses new data to examine how workers’ perceptions of the impact of trade are related to their career paths, job characteristics, and local labor market conditions....

The Use of Flexible Measures to Cope with Economic Crises in Germany and Brazil This study gives a comparative overview of labor market dynamics and institutional arrangements in Germany and Brazil with particular emphasis on industrial relations, wage setting, unemployment benefits, employment protection and vocational training. The paper shows that institutions determine the mode of adjustmen...

This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour force participation and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare are positively correlated with each other, while the wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fe...

In this paper we specialize the Ngai-Pissarides model of growth and structural change [American Economic Review 97 (2007), 429-443] to the case of three sectors, representing the primary (agriculture, mining), secondary (construction, manufacturing) and tertiary (services) sectors. On that basis we explore the dynamic properties of the model along the transition path to the steady-state equilib...

How does technological progress occur? Is the nature of innovation stable over time? We shed new light on these questions through a mixture of empirics and theory. We begin with an empirical analysis of patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Offi ce. This analysis reveals several striking facts that emphasize the increasing importance of novel combinations of technologies for...

Questioning the underlying assumptions of the process of creative destruction, we conceptualize an alternative process of creative construction that may characterize the dynamics between entrants and incumbents. We discuss the underlying mechanism of knowledge spillover strategic entrepreneurship whereby knowledge investments by existing organizations, when coupled with entrepreneurial action b...

We introduce non-homothetic preferences into an R&D based growth model to study how demand forces hape the impact of inequality on innovation and growth. Inequality affects the incentive to innovate via a price effect and a market size effect. When innovators have a large productivity advantage over traditional producers a higher extent of inequality tends to increase innovators’prices and mark...