It is widely believed that the integration of European economies will have little impact on labour mobility. This does not mean, however, that European labour markets will be unaffected by the process of economic integration. In this paper we show that with increased competition from closer...

A transformation of what had become a universal 40-hour standard working week in Germany began in 1985 with reductions negotiated in the metal-working and printing sectors. These reductions have continued through 1995, and were followed by reductions in other sectors. The union campaign aimed to...

Starting in 1985, (West) German unions began to reduce standard hours on an industry-by-industry basis in an attempt to lower unemployment. Whether ‘work-sharing’ works – whether employment rises when hours per worker are reduced – is theoretically ambiguous. I test this using both...

Nominal price and wage rigidity renders monetary policy effective over output. However, this effectiveness extends, under widely used overlapping-wage and Calvo-contract Phillips Curves, to planned monetary policy (‘exploitability’) and not merely to policy surprises. We argue that within...

The paper surveys recent analyses of rising unemployment in Europe based on the concept of the natural rate. It argues that there is a continuity of analysis from the classics through Keynes to these more recent approaches. Theories of efficiency wages, hysteresis, and insiders/outsiders are...

We log-linearise the Dellas and Tavlas (DT) model of monetary union and solve it analytically. We find that the intuition of optimal currency analysis of DT's second generation open economy model is essentially the same as that of first generation models. Monetary union results in no welfare...