The intention of the conference is to enable statistical agencies, economists, and statisticians to better understand the effect of economic changes on workers and firms. The employment and earnings effects of labor market legislation, firm restructuring, trade and technological change are important policy questions, but cannot be answered without looking at both the demand and supply side of the labor market (firms and the workers employed by those firms) at the same time. Linked data enable us to do this. Some European countries have begun this process, but because linking is relatively new, there has not been much interaction across countries. The conference has three main goals. It will establish a basis for international comparability of data, and a network between North American and European researchers involved in these issues. It will help the North American and European research community learn how to address linkage, access and confidentiality issues so that research on key employment and earnings issues can be compared across countries. It will demonstrate the value added from these linkages and help identify the resulting issues which can now be investigated. There are a number of outlets for disseminating these results. The best academic style papers, for example, will be published in a special issue of Labour Economics: An International Journal. A survey of the conference will be published in The Monthly Labor Review.
