Labour Supply and Incentives to Work in Europe highlights recent developments in the labour supply in Europe and gives a detailed assessment of their link with economic policies and labour market institutions. Despite major changes in European labour supply during the past few decades, the...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

This paper examines diverse aspects of the monetary integration of the ten new Member States (NMS) which joined the EU on 1 May 2004 into the euro area. Most NMS have undergone a rapid and deep transformation in all areas with considerable progress in their processes of reform and convergence,...

The start of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has spurred a new interest in the debate on the effects of monetary unions on regional economic integration. This literature either investigates past episodes of monetary unions or attempts to gauge any effect with a few years of EMU...

Ensuring the involvement of private sector creditors in the resolution of sovereign debt crises is crucial to ensure an effective management and orderly resolution of those crises. A review of experience gained in past financial crises suggests that crisis management practices have been largely...

Using the Consensus Economics dataset with individual expertforecasts from G7 countries we investigate determinants of disagreement (crosssectionaldispersion of forecasts) about six key economic indicators. Disagreementabout real variables (GDP, consumption, investment and unemployment)has a...

This paper focuses on tenure driven productivity dynamics of a firm-worker match asa potential explanation of "unemployment volatility puzzle". We let new matches andcontinuing jobs differ by their productivity levels and by their sensitivity to aggregateproductivity shocks. As a result, new...

This study looks at real estate price booms and busts in industrialised countries. Itidentifies major and persistent deviations from long term trends for 18 countries andestimates the probabilities of their occurrence using a Random Effects Panel Probitmodel over the period 1980-2007. It finds...

This paper reviews recent approaches to modeling the labour market and assessestheir implications for in‡ation dynamics through both their e¤ect on marginalcost and on price-setting behaviour. In a search and matching environment, weconsider the following modeling setups: right-to-manage...

In this paper we present an extension of the Taylor model with staggered wages inwhich wage-setting is also influenced by reference norms (i.e. by benchmark wages).We show that reference norms can considerably increase the persistence of inflationand the extent of real wage rigidity but that...