We address the question of whether foreign aid helps attract foreign direct investment (FDI). This could be achieved if well targeted aid removed critical impediments to higher FDI inflows. In particular, test the hypothesis that aid for education is an effective means to increase FDI flows to...

This paper investigates social mobility in Bolivia and discusses its implications for poverty reduction and long-run growth. Regressions based on household survey data show that social mobility is very low in Bolivia, even by Latin American standards. This is mainly caused by an inadequate...

This paper indicates that East Germany's unemployment originates primarily in the labor market, caused by the fast wage adjustment after German reunification. We model the resulting labor market traps in a search and matching framework, show that they are difficult to overcome, and provide...

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. -- Monetary persistence ; labor adjustment costs

This paper addresses the question of why prolonged regional unemployment differentials tend to persist even after their proximate causes have been reversed (e.g., after wages in the highunemployment regions have fallen relative to those in the low-unemployment regions). We suggest that the...

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 shows that the German labor market is more volatile than the US labor market. Specifically, the volatility of the cyclical component of several labor market variables (e.g., the job-finding rate, labor market tightness, and job vacancies) divided by the volatility of labor...

This paper analyses how and to which degree the Danish flexicurity concept and its various elements achieve the renowned Danish miracle by evaluating their unemployment and inequality effects and their complementarities. We develop a microfounded model of searching workers and firms, calibrate...

This paper provides a survey of the recent literature about firing costs and discusses the transmission channels of firing costs in a partial equilibrium context. In addition, we expand our analysis two types of firing costs in a New Keynesian model with purely endogenous separations. We further...

This paper estimates a series of shocks to hit the US economy during the Great Depression, using a New Keynesian model with unemployment and bargaining frictions. Shocks to long-run inflation expectations appear to account for much of the cyclical behavior of employment, while an increase in...