This paper evaluates the possible consequences of the forthcoming European and Monetary Union on wage behaviour. It will be shown that EMU does not influence wage policy directly, but rather indirectly through its implications on other areas of economic policy, predominantly on monetary policy....

In this paper, I analyze the pros and cons of implementing structural reforms of the labor market in booms vs. recessions, in light of considerations of social efficiency, political viability, and macroeconomic fine tuning. While the optimal timing of a reform depends on the relative importance...

Hiring is a costly activity reflecting firms' investment in their workers. Micro-data shows that hiring costs involve production disruption. Thus, cyclical fluctuations in the value of output, induced by price frictions, have consequences for the optimal allocation of hiring activities. We...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...

Using the Reserve Bank of Australia's MARTIN model we compare actual monetary policy decisions to a counterfactual in which the cash rate is set according to an optimal simple rule. We find that monetary policy played a crucial role in avoiding a potential recession in 2001 and mitigating the...

This paper presents a non-Malthusian theory of long-term development We model the interplay between the process of human capital formation, technological progress, and the biological constraint of finite lifetime expectancy. All these processes are interdependent and determined endogenously. The...

There has been a widespread displacement of coal by natural gas as space heating and cooking technology in Turkey in the last two decades, triggered by the deployment of natural gas networks. In this paper, we examine the impact of this development on mortality among adults and the elderly. Our...

We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa remain high, they have started to decline. According to UN projections, they will fall further in the coming decades such that by the mid-21st century the ratio of the...

Or Paradox Regained? The answer is Paradox Regained. New data confirm that for countries worldwide long-term trends in happiness and real GDP per capita are not significantly positively related. The principal reason that Paradox critics reach a different conclusion, aside from problems of data...