We find new empirical regularities in the business cycle in a cross-country panel of 22 OECD countries for the period 1972 to 2007; entrepreneurship Granger-causes the cycles of the world economy. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial cycle is positively affected by the national unemployment cycle. We discuss possible causes and implications of these findings.

This paper provides an overview of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an on-going international comparative survey study of educational outcomes at age 15. PISA is sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and for the period 1998-2010 has been designed and implemented by a consortium led by the Australian Council for Educational Resea...

The Wage Premium of Foreign Education: New Evidence from Australia We study whether Australian employers recognise immigrants’ education acquired abroad, and if so how. Using data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Immigrants in Australia, we apply interval regression to model migrant hourly earnings. We find substantially higher returns from human capital obtained in Australia and other OECD cou...

THIS PAPER EXPLORES the comparative productivity performance in manufacturing of three countries-Germany, Japan, and the United Statessince 1950.1 The productivity level estimates are based on the industryof-origin approach, making use of detailed information from censuses of manufactures for each country. Comparative measures of sectoral productivity levels have a vast array of applications in...

Everywhere in the OECD, there has been a shift in relative labor demand away from low-skill workers towards high-skill workers. In the United States, this has led to a decrease in the relative wage of low-skill workers. In Europe, constraints on the relative wage of low-skill workers have led instead to an increase in their unemployment rate, and thus an overall increase in unemployment. As Kru...