This note gives a brief survey of main theoretical and empirical issues with respect to the NAIRU concept. According to modern labour market literature NAIRU is defined as the rate of unemployment at which inflation stabilizes in the absence of any wage-price surprises. Conventional thinking...

The paper considers the "trade and wages" debate, and proposes two alternative explanations to explain the rising wage differential (relative wage of the skilled vs. the unskilled), other than the conventional Stolper-Samuelson explanation. The first is an explanation dubbed "kaleidoscopic...

We propose a bivariate structural time series framework to decompose GDP and the unemployment rate into their trend, cyclical, and irregular components. We implement Okun's law by a generalised version of the common cycles restriction allowing for a phase shift between the two cycles and add a...

Using data from the Vienna Stock Exchange we investigate three different types of consumption based capital asset pricing models: the well known two state model of Mehra and Prescott, the model of Rietz, which includes also a crash state, and an own four state model. The aim of this Vienna Stock...

We consider the case in which the opening up of an economy to migration results in departure of skilled workers. We point out that while the possibility of migration changes the set of employment opportunities, it also affects the structure of incentives: Higher returns to skills in the foreign...

In this paper we take up a model of Okada (1996) to describe the possibility of collective cooperation in a n-person Prisoner's Dilemma game by means of institutional arrangements. In addition, we introduce the possibility to corrupt the institutional authority by paying him some positive...

We specify conditions under which a strictly positive probability of employment in a foreign country raises the level of human capital formed by optimizing workers in the home country. While some workers migrate, "taking along" more human capital than if they had migrated without factoring in...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in per-capita income levels and growth rates is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

We demonstrate how altruism can surge in a population of nonaltruists. We assume that each individual plays a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game with his or her sibling, or with a stranger, and that the probability that an individual survives to reproduce is proportional to his or her payoff in...