This paper presents a simple diagrammatic analysis of an open economy's external adjustment process under habit-forming individual preferences. The exposition focuses on the consumption side and aims to make transparent the linkage among wealth, past consumption experience, and current...

The basic premise of this paper is that understanding aggregate dynamics requires considering that agents are heterogeneous and that they do not adjust continuously to the shocks they perceive. We provide a general characterization of lumpy behavior at the microeconomic level in terms of an...

This paper provides definitions and measures of the extent of adaptability of an economy to exogenous changes in product prices, factor availability and technological change. It is argued that flexibility can in general only be defined relative to the exogenous changes that occur. Using a dual...

This paper studies the mechanisms of international payments adjustment at work under the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, 1945 to 1971. I argue that two market failures, imperfect international capital mobility and imperfect wage-price flexibility, are central to understanding the...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a typology of different labor market configurations and investigate how two major structural adjustment policies, namely a trade liberalization reform and the relaxation of capital controls, affect the level of aggregate employment and the rate of...

When a stabilization has significant distributional implications (as in the case of tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit) different socio-economic groups will attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups. The process leading to a stabilization becomes a "war of...

This paper presents a structural macro simulation model to quantify the effects of alternative stabilization packages on the distribution of income and wealth. The model combines the explicit microeconomic optimizing behavior characteristic of computable general equilibrium models with asset...

Demographic changes in the labor force will imply that firms must change their labor policies in the coming decades. My estimates suggest that the labor force will get older and more female. The aging will not be as pronounced for males as for females because the trend toward early retirement...

This paper deals with structural adjustment in the highly indebted countries. The origins of the debt crisis are first analyzed. Then the nature of the adjustment followed by the debt ridden countries between 1982- 1987 is discussed. It is noted that for most nations the adjustment has been...

For the period 1959-1972 money growth in the United States was positively correlated with past inflation and negatively correlated with past unemployment, whereas for the period 1973-1984 this correlation pattern was reversed. International data, moreover, show that the eight largest western...