Implicit in many discussions of labour market policy is the assumption that, in the absence of interventions, the operation of the labour market is well-approximated by the perfectly competitive model. The merits or demerits of particular policies is then seen as a trade-off between efficiency and equality. This paper analyses the impact of a variety of policies – the minimum wage, trade unions...

This article estimates price-cost margins for the Portuguese markets in a context of imperfect competition in the labour market. The database used includes virtually the universe of Portuguese fi rms for the period 2005-2009. The results strongly reject the hypothesis of perfect competition in both labour and product markets. Estimated price-cost margins are very heterogeneous across markets an...

References 93 VI 1 Introduction Unemployment is still a central problem in European economies and an abiding theme in labour market policy. In the 1990s, in the European Union, rising unemployment led to an European employment policy and a new section on employment was introduced into the Amsterdam Treaty signed in October 1997. In the same year, the European Employment Strategy (EES) was initi...

The paper addresses the linkage between certain aspects of the increasing economic integration of world markets and the level of child labour. We empirically examine, first, the often-cited conventional wisdom that multinational enterprises invest in countries where the extent of child labour is relatively high and, second, the concern that countries may gain an unfair comparative advantage in ...

An apparent puzzle from the recent …nancial crisis is that economies with less competitive labor markets seem to have su¤ered less in terms of unemployment. The present paper investigates this puzzle by focusing on the interactions between …nancial and labor market imperfections. In particular, we augment a simpli…ed version of Gertler and Kiyotaki (2010) by introducing imperfect competition in...

The opinions expressed in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its Member countries. Division in the Directorate for Education and it complements the analyses being undertaken by the participating countries and the OECD Secretariat. The objectives of the review are to examine how the organisation, financi...

This paper investigates the impact of contemporary flows of immigrants on internal movements of natives and earlier immigrants across the local authorities of England and Wales. To analyse the impact of immigration, a theoretical framework where natives and immigrants are imperfect substitutes is adopted. The econometric analysis, based on the instrumental variable approach proposed by Card (20...