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Administrative data on the universe of employees, firms, and unemployment insurance (UI) recipients in Canada over an 11-year period are used to examine the operation of UI using the firm as the unit of analysis. Persistent transfers through UI are present at both industry and firm levels, and an analysis using firm fixed effect indicates that an important fraction of variation in them can be attributed to firm effects. Calculations of overall efficiency loss are very sensitive to the degree to which firm-level information is used. A full appreciation of how UI interacts with the labour market requires recognition of the characteristics and human resource practices of firms.

We use new training data from the British Household Panel Survey to explore the degree to which the data are consistent with the predictions of human capital theory. According to the raw data, most work-related training is general and is paid for by employers. Our fixed effects estimates reveal that employer-financed training is associated with higher wages both in the current and future firms, with some evidence that the impact in future firms is larger. These results are consistent with human capital theory with credit constraints, and with the relatively recent literature on training in imperfectly competitive labour markets.

This paper considers the effects on current pensioner incomes of reforms designed to improve the long-term sustainability of public pension systems in the European Union. We use EUROMOD to simulate a set of common illustrative reforms for four countries selected on the basis of their diverse pension systems and patterns of poverty among the elderly: Denmark, Germany, Italy and the UK. The variations in fiscal and distributive effects on the one hand suggest that different paths for reform are necessary in order to achieve common objectives across countries, and on the other provide indications of the appropriate directions for reform in each case.

I use data from employers and longitudinal data from former/current recipients covering the period 1997 to early 2004 to analyze the relationship between job skills, job changes, and the evolution of wages. I analyze the effects of job skill requirements on starting wages, on-the-job training opportunities, wage growth prospects, and job turnover. The results show that jobs of different skill requirements differ in their prospects for earnings growth, independent of the workers who fill these jobs. Furthermore, these differences in wage growth opportunities across jobs are important determinants of workers’ quit propensities (explicitly controlling for unobserved worker heterogeneity). The determinants and consequences of job dynamics are investigated. The results using a multiplicity of methods, including the estimation of a multinomial endogenous switching model of wage growth, show that job changes, continuity of work involvement, and the use of cognitive skills are all critical components of the content of work experience that leads to upward mobility. The results underscore the sensitivity of recipients’ job transition patterns to changes in labor market demand conditions.

We analyze and assess new evidence on employment dynamics from a new data source – the National Establishment Time Series (NETS). The NETS offers advantages over existing data sources for studying employment dynamics, including tracking business establishment relocations that can contribute to job creation or destruction on a regional level. Our primary purpose in this paper is to assess the reliability of the NETS data along a number of dimensions, and we conclude that it is a reliable data source although not without limitations. We also illustrate the usefulness of the NETS data by reporting, for California, a full decomposition of employment change into its six constituent processes, including job creation and destruction stemming from business relocation, which has figured prominently in policy debates but on which there has been no systematic evidence.

We examine the determinants of a current migrant's location choice emphasizing the relative importance and interaction of migrant stocks and flows. We show that both stocks and flow have significant impacts on the migrant's decision of where to locate. The significance and size of the effects vary according to legal status and whether the migrant is a “new” or a “repeat” migrant.

A method of systematically assessing the “first-round” impact of tax and transfer policy changes on the income distribution and the incidence of relative income poverty is proposed. It involves the construction of a “distributionally neutral” policy, which can be approximated by a policy that indexes tax allowances, credits and bands and welfare payment rates in line with a broad measure of income growth. The impact of actual policy changes in five EU countries over the 1998–2001 period is then measured against this benchmark, using the EUROMOD tax-benefit model.

Constructing pseudo-panel data from successive Current Population Surveys, this paper analyzes earnings inequality in husband and wife families over the life cycle and over time. Particular attention is devoted to the role of labor supply in influencing measures of earnings inequality. Compact and accurate descriptions of earnings inequality are derived that facilitate the analysis of the effect of the changing market employment of wives on earnings inequality. The growing propensity of married women to work for pay has mitigated the increase in family earnings inequality. Alternative measures of earnings inequality covering people with different degrees of attachment to the labor market are constructed. Inferences about the extent and changes in earnings inequality are sensitive to alternative labor supply definitions especially in the case of wives.

The paper examines the effect of family transfers on child poverty in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Family transfers are defined as to include non-contributory child benefits, contributory family allowances and tax credits or allowances. The drive to reduce child poverty is of particular interest in southern Europe, where public support to poor families with children is often meagre or not available at all. The paper uses the European cross-country microsimulation model, EUROMOD, to assess the distributional impact of existing family transfers and to explore the scope for policy reforms, before it concludes with a discussion of key findings and policy implications.

How individuals allocate their time between work and leisure has important implications regarding worker well-being. For example, more time at work means a greater return to human capital and a greater proclivity to seek more training opportunities. At the same time, hours spent at work decrease leisure and depend on one's home environment (including parental background), health, past migration, and government policies. In short, worker well-being depends on trade-offs and is influenced by public policy. These decisions entail time allocation, effort, human capital investment, health, and migration, among other choices. This volume considers worker well-being from the vantage of each of these alternatives. It contains ten chapters. The first three are on time allocation and work behavior, the next three on aspects of risk in the earnings process, the next two on aspects of migration, the next one on the impact of tax policies on poverty, and finally the last chapter on the role of labor market institutions on sectoral shifts in employment.