The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and the central bank's rule-based behavior in Russia. Using different policy rules, we test whether the central bank in Russia reacts to changes in inflation, output gap and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. Our...

A small expectations-expanded "Mundell-Fleming" model is built for the European Union Accession Countries and estimated to assess the optimality of different exchange rate regimes (a peg and a float) through a simple welfare function. Floating appears as the best option for most of the countries...

This paper uses a Markov regime-switching model to assess the vulnerability of a series of Central and Eastern European countries (i.e. Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic) and two CIS countries (i.e., Russia and Ukraine) during the period 19932004. For the new EU member states in Central...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the trade gains arising from the constitution ofa currency union for a set of economically large, developed nations who create a monetary union as a deliberate economic policy action: namely, for the members of the euro area. With a 1980-2001 sample, no...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian model with labor turnover costs in which wages are set according to a right to manage bargaining where the firms' counterpart is given by currently employed workers. Our model captures well the salient features of European labor...

This paper characterizes long-run and short-run optimal fiscal policy in the labor selection framework. In a calibrated non-Ramsey decentralized equilibrium, labor market volatility is inefficient. Keeping fixed the structural parameters, the Ramsey government achieves efficient labor market...

This paper provides a theoretical and quantitative analysis of various types of wellknown employment subsidies. Two important questions are addressed: (i) How should employment subsidies be targeted? (ii) How large should the subsidies be? We consider measures involving targeting workers with...

This paper analyzes the effects of short-time work (i.e., government subsidized working time reductions) on unemployment and output fluctuations. The central question is whether the rule based component (i.e., the existence of the institution short-time work) and the discretionary component...

This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms' job offer and workers' job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show that...

Many labor market models use both idiosyncratic productivity and a vacancy free entry condition. This paper shows that these two features combined generate an equilibrium comovement between matches on the one hand and unemployment and vacancies on the other hand, which is observationally...