The outburst of the 2008 global economic crisis sparked a myriad of criticism on mainstream neoclassical economic theory, held responsible for not even have considered the possibility of the kind of collapse that the subprime mortgage meltdown unleashed. In this paper, it is argued that what...

This paper presents the results of a text based exploratory study of over 20,000 academic articles published in seven top research journals from 1960-2010. The goal is to investigate the general research foci of economists over the last fifty years, how (if at all) they have changed over time,...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

This paper reveals that German firms with working time accounts (WTAs) show a similar separation and hiring behavior in response to revenue changes as firms without WTAs. This finding casts doubt on the popular hypothesis that WTAs were the key driver of the unusually small increase in German...

Several contributions have recently assessed the size of fiscal multipliers both in RBC models and New Keynesian models. None of the studies considers a model with frictional labour markets which is a crucial element, particularly at times in which much of the fiscal stimulus has been directed...

In this paper, the authors investigate the determinants of weight for leisure in preferences. First, using a dynamic general equilibrium model, they back out the weight for leisure for an unbalanced panel of 52 countries over the period from 1950 to 2009. Then, the authors perform several panel...

We construct a Blanchard-style overlapping generations model consisting of long-lived individuals who have uninsurable idiosyncratic risk resulting from uncertain retirement periods and medical costs in retirement. Without social insurance, such individuals must save for these eventualities. We...

The paper studies the major institutional changes that are at the root of the increase in the west European unemployment rate in the last quartercentury from below 3 percent to 11 percent. The institutional characteristics of wage bargaining, the tax wedge and the legal rules hamper the...

This paper presents error correction estimates of a simple interdependent model of the labour market using monthly data over 1990-1994 for the industrial sector in Poland and Hungary. The aim is to investigate three issues in the performance of labour markets during transition. First, is there a...