Stefano Scarpetta

• PhD in Economics
• Managing Director at Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

In this chapter, the author reviews the implementation of active labor market policies by countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) tracing some of the major themes from the volume’s chapters. The author places active labor market policies within the framework of an activation strategy that involves a fine balanc...

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the United States and much of the developed world were rocked by three successive economic shocks, each one more severe than the one before. Real relief from these economic shocks, of course, can only come from a restored economy—with balanced strength across many sectors and regions. Safety...

The COVID-19pandemic and its associated government measures to limit mobility impacted patterns and places of alcohol consumption. While the path to recovery remains long and difficult, this crisis also increases the risk that individuals engage in harmful drinking to cope with stress. During the COVID-19pandemic, there has been an increase in dome...

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has rapidly increased since discovery of the disease in December 2019. In the absence of medical countermeasures to stop the spread of the disease (i.e. vaccines), countries have responded by implementing a suite of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIS) to contain and mitigate COVID-19. Individual NPIs range...

This paper analyses the impact of employment protection (EP) on the composition of the workforce and worker turnover using a unique firm-level dataset for Italy. The impact of employment protection is analyzed by means of a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits the variation in EP provisions in Italy across firms below and above a siz...

The OECD Observer, OECD's quarterly magazine presents concise, up-to-date and authoritative analysis of crucial world economic and social issues. Through the pages of the Observer OECD’s experts offer insights on the questions facing the Organisation’s member governments and provide an excellent opportunity for readers to stay ahead of policy debat...

The past three decades have witnessed major changes in the economic and social fabric of developing and emerging economies, bringing new opportunities but also challenges. Addressing the latter requires a complex set of factors that shape the investment climate and promote sustainable growth and job creation in the formal sector. Labor market, soci...

IZA Discussion Paper 7594. Abstract: This paper analyses the impact of employment protection (EP) on the composition of the workforce and worker turnover using a unique firm-level dataset for Italy. The impact of employment protection is analyzed by means of a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits the variation in EP provisions across...

Migration has become a constant factor in the economic and social landscape. Most OECD countries are net immigration countries, and the share of immigrants has been rising in almost all of them. There are now more than 115 million immigrants in OECD countries, about 10% of the population. A further 5% of the native-born population has at least one...

Economic analysts suggest that inclusive recovery measures in G20 countries need to focus on creating more and better jobs. Policymakers in these countries need to ensure that lower wages are able to raise the welfare of consumers without being converted into higher profit margins. This requires major efforts to boost competition in the markets for...

Despite repeated signals that growth is resuming, unemployment or under-employment in low-paid jobs remain stubbornly high in many countries. Promoting sustained job creation is now the defining challenge of many governments around the world.

In this paper, we present evidence on how employers in developing and emerging economies perceive employment regulations and react to them. We use harmonized surveys of about 10,800 firms around the world, supplemented by indicators of the stringency of employment protection that summarize detailed aspects of the labor legislation. We find that fir...

In OECD countries, the pension landscape has been changing at an astonishing pace over the past few years. After decades of debate and, in some cases, political standstill, many countries have launched significant pension reforms, including higher retirement ages, changes in the way entitlements are calculated and other measures to introduce saving...

Près de six ans après le début de la crise financière et économique mondiale, la situation économique est très variable selon les pays de l’OCDE, entre l’amorce d’une reprise aux États-Unis, au Canada et au Japon, et des perspectives toujours moroses dans de nombreux pays européens. Après une période où, dans le cadre des plans de relance, des ress...

Almost six years since the start of the global financial and economic crisis, economic conditions vary widely across OECD countries, with the United States, Canada and Japan on a path to recovery, while the economic prospects of many European countries remain subdued. After a period in which, as part of the stimulus packages, greater resources were...

This paper analyses the impact of employment protection (EP) on the composition of the workforce and worker turnover using a unique firm-level dataset for Italy. The impact of employment protection is analyzed by means of a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits the variation in EP provisions across firms below and above a size thresho...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such as productivity or output per capita, to differences i...

This note examines the balance of activation strategies in OECD countries, where this type of policy approach has a long tradition. Countries share the objective of strengthening employment and reducing benefit dependency and vulnerability among the working-age population, but the balance of policy measures differs widely. While debates on the effe...

The financial and economic crisis shattered the Lisbon Strategy’s attempt to increase the EU’s employment rate to 70% among 15–64 year olds by 2010. The new Europe 2020 strategy envisages a 75% adult employment rate by 2020; however, this goal also seems unrealistic in light of the economic crisis which has caused the EU’s employment rate to drop s...

This article investigates the effect of product market liberalisation on employment allowing for interactions between policies and institutions in product and labour markets. Using panel data for OECD countries over the period 1980-2002, we present evidence that product market deregulation is more effective at the margin when labour market regulati...

In this paper, we review theory and evidence on the links between product market regulations that curb competitive pressures, the efficiency of resource allocation and productivity growth. We show that product market regulations differ across countries and industries and have evolved differently over time. We argue that differences in regulation ha...

No abstract available.

We test whether the growth experience of a sample of 21 OECD countries over the past three decades is more consistent with the augmented Solow model or the Uzawa-Lucas model, by exploiting the different non-linear restrictions implied by them as regards the relationship between factor shares and speed of convergence. Using cross-country/time-series...

This paper provides a critical review of the recent empirical evidence on the links between regulations affecting the hiring and firing of workers, labour reallocation and productivity growth. It also reviews how workers affected by labour mobility fare and discusses policy options to support them. The upshot is that stringent employment protection...

Using firm-level data for a sample of European countries, we focus on the effects that product-market regulations have on firm-level TFP growth. We proxy regulatory burdens using the OECD indicators of sectoral non-manufacturing regulations. These allow accounting for both the direct effects of sectoral regulation on within-sector performance and t...

In this note we document how constraints in the business environment, as perceived by individual firms, differ both across countries and within each country, across firms. This finding is of key importance given recent theoretical models that suggest idiosyncratic distortions can have large aggregate effects. Not only do such distortions affect the...

The global economic crisis has hit youth very hard. In the OECD area, the youth (15-24) unemployment rate rose by 6 percentage points in the two years to the end of 2009, to reach almost 19%. There are currently nearly 15 million youth unemployed in the OECD area, about four million more than at the end of 2007. And in countries like France and Ita...

This book strives to better understand the recent labor market trends in the countries of the region and the factors that underlie the failure of many of those countries to create more, but especially more productive and rewarding jobs. In particular, the book addresses four main questions: how well are the Latin American and Caribbean economies do...

Employment policies worldwide are under severe stress to weather the impact of the global economic downturn, warranting government intervention through effective policies. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study reveals that 28 countries surveyed have undertaken numerous initiatives to fill the gaps in the safety net...

This chapter reports the results from a large research project bringing together researchers from twenty-four countries to standardize data definitions and construct comparable statistics on producer dynamics and productivity. It shows that within-firm changes in productivity and net entry are the major sources of labor productivity growth in most...

The process of creative destruction is being documented for a growing number of countries as the required firm-level data are becoming more easily accessible to researchers. Some early attempts have been made to compare results from the individual country studies and to gain insights into the sources of the variation in firm dynamics across countri...

In this paper, we test whether the growth experience of a sample of OECD countries over the past three decades is more consistent with the human-capital augmented Solow model of exogenous growth, or with an endogenous growth model à la Uzawa-Lucas with constant returns to scale to “broad” (human and physical) capital. We exploit the different non-l...

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that, even in narrowly defined industries, there is significant heterogeneity in firm productivity and firm size. Moreover, consistent with core theoretical models of the size distribution of firms, the productivity and size distributions are closely related - that is, more productive firms are larger....

This paper calculates indices of central bank autonomy (CBA) for 163 central banks as of end-2003, and comparable indices for a subgroup of 68 central banks as of the end of the 1980s. The results confirm strong improvements in both economic and political CBA over the past couple of decades, although more progress is needed to boost political auton...

There is a wide agreement on the fact that a large informal economy leaves many individuals without social protection and reduces government's tax revenue and social security contributions. However, it remains an open question what really drives informality, namely whether workers are simply trapped out of the formal sector or, at least some of the...

Advanced market economies are characterized by a continuous process of creative destruction. Market forces and technological developments play a major role in shaping this process, but institutional and policy settings also influence firms’ decision to enter, to expand if successful and to exit if competition becomes unbearable. In this paper we fo...

In this paper we assess the role of reallocation of resources -- through shifts in market shares among incumbents as well as through firm entry and exit – to productivity. We are motivated by the evidence in all countries studied of heterogeneity of firms and substantial mobility of factors of production across firms in each market. However, rece...

*Inter-American Development Bank, * * OECD. This article represents the views of the authors and not those of the Inter-American Development Bank or the OECD. The authors would like to thank Andrea Borgarello, Francesco Devicenti, Analia Olgiati and Marco Stampini for their outstanding work. We also acknowledge useful comments from participants to...

ABSTRACT : This paper looks at how well Finland performs in high growth entrepreneurship and uses data from the Global Entrepreneurship monitor to benchmark Finland against other European countries. It is found that Finland’s prevalence rate of high growth entrepreneurial activity lags significantly behind most of its European and all of its Scandi...

This paper reviews the process of job creation and destruction across a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade. It exploits a harmonized firm-level data-set drawn from business registers and enterprise census data. The paper assesses the importance of technological factors that characterize different industries in expla...

Leading international economists discuss how and why institutions influence growth; empirical and theoretical studies that provide an overview and contribute to the current research. The determinants of economic growth and development are hotly debated among economists. Financial crises and failed transition experiments have highlighted the fact th...

Drawing from harmonized surveys of firms around the world, we compare employers' responses with actual labor legislation. Employers' concerns about labor regulations are closely related to the relative stringency of labor laws. Medium and large firms, as well as innovating firms, are those most negatively affected by onerous labor regulations.

We estimate the employment effects of product market reforms aimed at increasing competitive pressures and easing government controls in a sample of OECD countries over the past two decades. We control for several labour market policies and institutions that are thought to influence equilibrium employment rates, and check whether there are interact...

Comment on: Suzanne Duryea, Gustavo Márquez, Carmen Pagés, and Stefano Scarpetta, who review evidence on labor market mobility in nine countries. Three countries come from Latin America, while the remainder are transition economies in Eastern Europe. The period of study ranges from as little as two years to eleven years. The paper uses longitudinal...

This paper assesses the implications of past and ongoing reforms in OECD product markets for the labour productivity gap, a key component of cross-country differences in GDP per capita. After a brief review of the theoretical literature, we bring together the results obtained in some of our empirical work over the past few years, discussing econome...

In this paper, we present cross-country evidence on firm size distribution, firm demographic and post-entry performance for 10 OECD countries. We use harmonized firm-level data drawn from business registers or social security records.These data enable international comparisons and the identification of idiosyncratic country effects. While average f...

In this paper, we present evidence on how employers perceive labor regulations and react when these are perceived to constrain the operation of their firm. The paper draws from harmonized surveys of (up to) 17,000 firms around the world, and compares employers’ responses with actual labor legislation. We find that employers’ concerns about labor re...

The growth of young, technology-based firms has received considerable attention in the literature given their importance for the generation and creation of economic wealth. Taking a strategic management perspective, we link the entrepreneurial strategy deployed by young, technology-based firms with firm growth. In line with recent research, we cons...

The authors present empirical evidence on the determinants of industry-level multifactor productivity growth. They focus on"traditional factors,"including the process of technological catch up, human capital, and research and development (R&D), as well as institutional factors affecting labor adjustment costs. Their analysis is based on harmonized...

To what extend have macro and structural reforms in many developing countries affected the labor market? Are current policy settings in the labor market adequate to cope with the current challenges of a more dynamic but also more risky economic environment? Are there examples of successful labor reforms that have combined greater adaptability with...

The view that the Internet and the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution would deliver a frictionless economy without recessions is, at least for the time being, dead. This book takes stock of the ICT revolution, going well below the surface to ask and answer a few key questions: Did the ICT revolution contribute to the recent d...

This paper presents estimates of the cyclical fluctuations of price-cost margins, following an extended version of the Rotemberg and Woodford (1991) approach. The results support the hypothesis of counter-cyclical price margins in most manufacturing industries, especially in the presence of downward rigidities of labour inputs. This is consistent w...

This paper presents evidence on firm demographics and firm survival for a group of ten OECD countries. For each country a dataset of sectoral indicators of firm dynamics has been created using information from business registers. The patterns of firm entry, exit, survival and employment growth are described and analysed across countries, sectors, a...

In this paper, we look at differences in the scope and depth of pro-competitive regulatory reforms and privatisation policies as a possible source of cross-country dispersion in growth outcomes. The paper suggests that, despite extensive liberalisation and privatisation in the OECD area, the cross-country variation of regulatory settings has increa...

Liberalization and privatization have made the regulatory environment more market-friendly throughout the OECD. However using a large new dataset on product market regulation, we show that regulatory policies in OECD nations have become more dissimilar in relative terms, even as all nations have liberalized. This seemingly contradictory finding is...

In this paper we present an overview of GDP and productivity growth patterns in OECD countries over the past decade, on the basis of harmonized data. Our evidence suggests that fast-growing countries generally shared three characteristics: improvements in labour utilization; a generalized enhancement in human capital; and rapid shifts in the compos...

From an accounting point of view, two main factors seem to have played an important role in explaining the growing disparities in growth paths across the OECD countries over the past decade: differences in productivity patterns of certain high-tech industries; and differences in the pace of adoption of the new information and communication technolo...

Unlike previous panel-data studies, using an improved dataset and PMG estimators, we find a significant impact of human capital on growth. The estimated long-run elasticity of output to human capital is consistent with the microeconomic evidence on returns to schooling.

The economic performance of some OECD countries over the past decade, most notably the United States, has renewed the interest of analysts and policy makers on economic growth and on how policy can eventually support it. This report sheds some light on this issue by relying on harmonised macro and sectoral data for OECD countries and a unique cross...

This paper discusses links between policy settings, institutions and economic growth in OECD countries on the basis of pooled cross-country time-series regressions. The novel econometric approach used in the paper allows short-term adjustments and convergence speeds to vary across countries, in accordance with most theoretical models, while imposin...

Cette étude évalue les fluctuations cycliques des taux de marge, suivant une formulation élargie de la méthode de Rotemberg et Woodford (1991). Les résultats confortent l'hypothèse que les taux de marge sont anticycliques dans la plupart des industries, notamment en présence de rigidités à la baisse de l'emploi. Ce constat s'accorde avec les conclu...

The Czech Republic is facing a population ageing phenomenon. In addition, its demographic structure is expected to change dramatically over the next 50 years. We apply a stylised overlapping generation model in order to analyse the potential effects of the expected demographic changes on aggregate economic performance taking into account alternativ...

This special issue of the European Journal of Population focuses on possible economic consequences of low fertility in Europe. This introduction reviews the history of falling fertility in Europe and the literature that explores its causes, its potential implications, and possible policy responses. It also summarizes the evolution of thinking about...

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of the 1980s and 1990s partly reflects changes in the sec...

This paper presents empirical estimates of human-capital augmented growth equations for a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1971-98. It uses an improved dataset on human capital and a novel econometric technique that reconciles growth model assumptions with the needs of panel data regressions. Unlike several previous studies, our results p...

This paper discusses links between policy settings, institutions and economic growth in OECD countries on the basis of cross-country time-series regressions. The econometric approach allows short-term adjustments and convergence speeds to vary across countries, imposing restrictions only on the long-run coefficients. In addition to the ‘primary’ in...

This paper discusses links between policy settings, institutions and economic growth in OECD countries on the basis of pooled cross-country time-series regressions. The novel econometric approach used in the paper allows short-term adjustments and convergence speeds to vary across countries, in accordance with most theoretical models, while imposin...

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of the 1980s and 1990s partly reflects changes in the sec...

Welfare and Employment in a United Europe takes a nuanced approach to the issues. Unusual for an edited volume, it consists of two long studies—each written by a group of economists working in four different countries of the European Union—followed by commentary. Over the last twenty years, fifteen Western European nations have removed most barrier...