This study investigates Okun’s law in OECD countries by examining estimates for male and female age cohorts for the period 1998–2012. We find that the estimated Okun coefficients are not always statistically significant for each subgroup of the population. Our results also highlight a...

The informational value of the aggregate US unemployment rate has recently been questioned because of a unit root in the labor-force participation rate; the lack of mean reversion implies that long-run changes in unemployment rates are highly unlikely to reflect long-run changes in joblessness....

In this paper, we propose new simple innovational outlier (IO) panel unit root tests with a break. A bootstrap method for dealing with cross-sectional dependence is provided and small sample properties of the bootstrap tests are investigated by Monte Carlo experiments. The panel innovational...

Arguing that crises are similar if they are predictable from historical experience, we employ panel logit models to examine similarities in the run-ups to the current global financial crisis and historical banking crises. Asset bubbles are the most common precursors.

The paper estimates the impact of labor market variables on crime in the Philippines using national-level time series and regional-level panel data. The evidence suggests that wage rate and labor force participation rate have stronger effect on crime than criminal deterrence variables.

We extend Breitung’s (2000) panel data unit root test to the case of fixed time (T) dimension while still allowing for heteroscedastic and serially correlated error terms. The analytic local power function of the new test is derived assuming that only the cross section dimension of the panel...

A stylized fact of European unemployment dynamics is one of extreme persistence and possible unit root behavior. This has led to a major reconsideration of the natural rate paradigm. We apply the Kalman filter to estimate the natural rate of unemployment for Germany and France. When the moving...

New estimates of an aggregate long-term production function for the post-war U.S. economy are reported. The results indicate that this long-term aggregate production function exhibits a slight but statistically significant increasing returns to scale. Since virtually all econometric growth...

This paper suggests that a model in which firms face credit constrains on hiring labor can explain both the behavior of the labor wedge and the “jobless recoveries” phenomenon of the last three recessions. Using the corporate credit spread as a measure of firms' credit conditions, I show...