Japan faces the problem of how to finance retirement, health, and long-term care expenditures as the population ages. This paper analyzes the impact of policy options intended to address this problem by employing a dynamic general equilibrium overlapping generations model, specifically...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects and sequencing of (LMRs) and product (PMRs) market reforms in Morocco. It finds that introducing LMRs and PMRs simultaneously would add about 2.5 percentage points (pp) of GDP growth and reduce unemployment by about 2.2 pp after five years. If...

We study a model where an employer, trying to fill a vacancy, engages in optimal sequential search by drawing from two subpopulations of candidates who differ in their ""discourse systems"": during an interview, a minority candidate with a discourse system not shared with the employer conveys a...

The paper studies the employment effects of a deposit-refund scheme on labor in a simple search-theoretic model of the labor market. It is shown that if a firm pays a deposit to the government when it fires a worker, to be refunded when it employs the same or another worker, the vacancy rate...

Germany''s export market share increased since 2000, while most industrial countries experienced declines. This study explores four explanations and evaluates their empirical contributions: (i) improved cost competitiveness, (ii) ties to fast growing trading partners, (iii) increased demand for...

Legally mandated reductions in the workweek can be either a constraint on individuals'' choice or a tool to coordinate individuals'' preferences for lower work hours. We confront these two hypotheses by studying the consequences of the workweek reduction in France from 39 to 35 hours, which was...

A reduction in the legal workweek may induce a degree of downward wage flexibility, while an employment subsidy to firms accommodates downward wage rigidity. It may be possible, therefore, to increase employment with a policy that combines a reduction in the workweek with an employment subsidy....

Banks' living wills involve both recovery and resolution. Since it may not always be clear when recovery plans or actions should be triggered, there is a role for an objective metric to trigger recovery. We outline how such a metric could be constructed meeting criteria of (i) adequate loss...

Major operational incidents in payment systems suggest the need to improve their resiliency. Meanwhile, as payment infrastructures become more digitalized, integrated, and interdependent, they require an even higher degree of resilience. Moreover, risks that could trigger major disruptions have...

Nonviable 'zombie' firms have become a key concern in China. Using novel firm-level industrial survey data, this paper illustrates the central role of zombies and their strong linkages with stateowned enterprises (SOEs) in contributing to debt vulnerabilities and low productivity. As a group,...