Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

Bei Vorliegen nach unten starrer Nominallöhne erschwert niedrige Inflation Reallohnanpassungen und führt so möglicherweise zu erhöhter gleichgewichtiger Arbeitslosigkeit. Dieser Aufsatz analysiert die wachsende Evidenz zu nach unten starren Nominallöhnen. Es werden nicht nur die...

This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

Bivariate duration data frequently arise in economics, biostatistics and other areas. In "bivariate frailty models", dependence between the frailties (i.e., unobserved determinants) induces dependence between the durations. Using notions of quadrant dependence, we study restrictions that this...

This paper examines the set of interdependences between the formation of wages, prices and the minimum wage (SMIC) through a vectorial error correction model estimated on French quarterly macroeconomic data covering the 1970-1/1999-4 period. Two periods are distinguished: the period of inflation...

This paper shows that a graduated minimum wage, in contrast to a constant minimum wage, can provide a strict Pareto improvement over what can be achieved with an optimal income tax. The reason is that a graduated minimum wage requires high-productivity workers to work more to earn the same...

Previous literature shows that internal migration rates are strongly procyclical. This would seem to imply that geographic relocation does not help mitigate negative local economic shocks during recessions. This paper shows that this is not the case. I document that net in-migration rates...

Distinguishing carefully between mobility across firms and across occupations, this study provides causal estimates of the wage effects of mobility among graduates from apprenticeship in Germany. Our instrumental variables approach exploits variation in regional labor market characteristics....

We use a novel approach to studying the heterogeneity in the job finding rates of the nonemployed by classifying the nonemployed by labor force status (LFS) histories, instead of using only one-month LFS. Job finding rates differ substantially across LFS histories: they are 25-30% among those...

This paper provides new evidence on educational disruptions caused by the Cultural Revolution and identifies the returns to schooling in urban China by exploiting individual-level variation in the effects of city-wide disruptions to education. The return to college is estimated at 49.8% using a...