The main aim of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debate on the facets of the Greek crisis via an analysis of the changes in the institutional framework of the labour market that are introduced as a result of the EU/IMF mechanism for financial support. The paper tries to make sense of...

As we write, the world is still in the grips of a financial crisis. Germany was one of the first countries to bail out a bank in July 2007. Then, in September 2007, the United Kingdom (UK) witnessed a run on a building society, Northern Rock, and the subsequent widespread nationalization of its...

It is now increasingly acknowledged that complex global processes, from the financial to the ecological, connect the fate of communities across the world. Yet the problem-solving capacity of the existing system of global institutions is in many areas not effective, accountable, or fast enough to...

We investigate the dramatic 2008–2009 trade collapse using microdata from a small open economy, Belgium. Belgian trade essentially fell because of reduced quantities and unit prices, rather than fewer firms involved in international transactions, fewer trading partners per firm, or fewer...

The term “globalisation” has survived its first significant sell-by date in modern times. Rightly, it continues to attract policy attention and debate at the very highest levels. Together with just a handful of others—economic growth and inequality, financial crisis, climate change—with...

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the cyclical behavior of US unemployment that poses a challenge to standard search and matching models. The correlation between cyclical unemployment and the cyclical component of labor productivity switched sign at the beginning of the Great...

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...

Shimer (2005a) claims that the Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment lacks an ampiflication mechanism because it cannot generate the observed business cycle fluctuations in unemployment given labor productivity shocks of plausible magnitude. This paper argues that part of the problem...