Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labour market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

We estimate a New Keynesian DSGE model on French, German, Italian, and Spanish data. The main aim of this paper is to check for the respective sets of parameters that are stable over time, making use of the ESS procedure ('Estimate of Set of Stable parameters') developed by Inoue and Rossi...

The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast, we use a large German administrative micro data set for the time span 1975-2004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...

The expansion of Western European production accelerated in the first half of 1997. Exports were the main engine, driven by a devaluation of European currencies and strong growth abroad. Domestic demand also picked up somewhat led by investment in machinery and equipment. Inflation remained at...

An Englishman once watched his first American football game. He looked intently as the team gathered into a huddle after each play. His American host asked him what he thought of the proceedings. “Not a bad sport,” remarked the visitor, “but they do seem to engage in an excessive number of...

This study explores a new modelling approach that bridges the gap between multilateral country-level data and the bilateral-model based, goods-market specific purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis. Under this approach, PPP is embedded in latent common factors, extractable from a large set of...

Research efforts towards new energy sources and towards the efficiency of energy use will be vital to reducing CO2 abatement costs in the long term. Can such efforts be induced by price instruments? Economists often cite induced technological change as a possible consequence of environmental...

This paper evaluates complementarities of labor market institutions and the business cycle in the context of a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model economy. Matching between workers and vacancies with endogenous time spent in search, Nash-bargained wages, payroll taxation, and...