Why is GDP growth so much more volatile in poor countries than in rich ones? We identify four possible reasons: (i) poor countries specialize in more volatile sectors; (ii) poor countries specialize in fewer sectors; (iii) poor countries experience more frequent and more severe aggregate shocks...

Systematic differences in the timing of wage setting decisions among industrialized countries provide an ideal framework to study the importance of wage rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy. The Japanese Shunto, for example, presents a clear case of bunching in wage setting decisions:...

A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW). That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony, international labour standards, inspection and compliance and the interaction between the NMW and the social security system. The NMW was...

This paper considers a model in which the unemployed have to incur a cost to maintain their skills. If whether they have done so is not observable, the economy has multiple equilibrium supported by self-fulfilling beliefs on the part of the employers. There is a unique steady state equilibrium...

This paper presents a one-sided incomplete (asymmetric) information bargaining game in a dynamic general equilibrium framework. The model predicts business cycle movements in the economy with persistence mechanism arising from asymmetric information and search. The employment level is...

Productivity growth in 329 companies (total employment = 1.96 million workers) is analysed for the period 1984-1989. The study breaks new ground by (i) analysing the impact of changes in union status - such as repudiation of a closed shop or derecognition - on productivity growth; (ii) examining...

We revisit Western Europe’s record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

Most managers enjoy considerable discretion and protection from possible interventions which enables them to look after their own interests. This is often attributed to the dispersion of shareholders and regulations that deter effective outside interventions. This paper presents a model that has...

This paper shows that search in the labor market has important effects on accumulation decisions. In a labor market characterized by search, employment contracts are naturally incomplete and this creates a wedge between the rates of return and marginal products of both human and physical...

In the presence of labor market imperfections, workers do not receive their full marginal product and the skill level of the workforce becomes a public good from which all firms benefit. As a result, the adoption of an innovation that increases the non-firm specific human capital of a worker...