We build quadratic labor adjustment costs into an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model of the business cycle and show that this is sufficient to increase both, output and inflation persistence.

We compare changes in schooling output and in schooling input of six East Asian countries to derive a measure of productivity change. Our results question the impression that all is well with education in East Asia. First, we find that the cognitive achievement of pupils did not change...

While it is largely uncontroversial that human capital can be considered as one of the shaping factors of economic growth, no agreement exists on the specific role of human capital formation. Competing theories all stressing different aspects of human capital formation are not in short supply,...

This paper examines the interactions between employment and training policies. Their effectiveness in stimulating income may be interdependent for various important reasons. For example, the more employment policies stimulate the employment rate, the greater the length of time over which workers...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

We reconsider the effects of long-run economic growth on relative factor prices across cones of specialization. We model economic growth as exogenous technical change. Allowing for capital biased technical change with a sector bias and for endogenous commodity prices, we find that economic...

We analyze the interaction among important institutional variables in the labor market (firing costs, minimum wages and unemployment benefits) in determining firm-provided training. We find that the institutional interactions - specifically, their degree of complementarity and substitutability -...

Using a standard dynamic general equilibrium model, we show that the interaction of staggered nominal contracts with hyperbolic discounting leads to inflation having significant long-run effects on real variables.