Measuring Labor Market Frictions: A Cross-Country Comparison In this paper we define and estimate measures of labor market frictions using data on job durations. We compare different estimation methods and different types of data. We propose and apply an unconditional inference method that can be applied to aggregate duration data. It does not require wage data, it is invariant to the way in wh...

Inter-industry Wage Dispersion in Portugal: high but falling This paper examines the size of inter-industry wage dispersion in Portugal and compares with other countries. We find that the country has a high inter-industry wage inequality compared with the European standard. Nevertheless, the dispersion reduced over the 1980s and the early 1990s along a process of centralisation of the wage sett...

The PERSONAL SOCIAL SERVICES RESEARCH UNIT undertakes social and health care research, supported mainly by the Department of Health, and focusing particularly on policy research and analysis of equity and efficiency in community care, long-term care and related areas — including services for elderly people, people with mental health problems and children in care. Views expressed in PSSRU public...

Effects of Sexual Preferences on Earnings in the Netherlands A small literature suggests that bisexual and homosexual workers earn less than their heterosexual fellow workers and that a discriminating labor market is partly to blame. In this paper we examine whether sexual preferences affect earnings in the beginning of working careers in the Netherlands. We find (i) that young and highly educa...

Immigrant Participation in Social Assistance Programs* The share of foreigners in the German social assistance program exceeds their population share and continues to grow. This study tests whether higher foreigner welfare dependence is due to foreign-native differences in behavior as opposed to exogenous characteristics. The determinants of welfare dependence are analyzed using data from the G...

Microeconometric Evaluation of the Active Labour Market Policy in Switzerland In the second part of the 1990’s Switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy (ALMP) encompassing a wide variety of programmes. We evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants. Our econometric analysis uses unusually informative data orig...

Sexual Bias and Household Consumption: A Semiparametric Analysis of Engel Curves in Rural China We analyze Engel curves for nuclear households in rural China. The sample includes more than 5000 nuclear families covering nineteen out of thirty Chinese provinces. We consider expenditures on food, also subdivided into several food subcategories such as cereals, or meat and fish, and other consumpt...

The Rate of Return to Private Schooling This paper examines the relationship between “school quality” and earnings in the United Kingdom. The specific focus is on evaluating the effect that private schooling has on hourly wage rates. It is well known that private (i.e. fee-paying) schools compared to state schools score higher on most measures of school quality. Therefore by comparing individua...