This study is an attempt to determine the factors that influence a firm’s choice of capital structure in three Asian countries: Japan, Malaysia and Pakistan. The specific objective is to investigate if country’s economic factors play a significant role in determining capital structure...

The variation in the degree of price regulation in the property-liability insurance market in Canada varies across time and space, creating an opportunity to test a recurring theory in regulatory economics: that price regulated firms have higher levels of financial leverage. Using an...

This paper investigates strategic brinksmanship between regulated property-liability insurance firms and their regulators. Prior research suggests that firms increase their financial leverage, and thus their probability of bankruptcy and expected bankruptcy costs, in order to mitigate the...

Comparing labor markets of the United States and Germany over the period 1980 − 2004 uncovers three stylized differences: (1) transition rates from unemployment to employment (UE) were lower by a factor of 5 and inflow rates from employment to unemployment (EU) were lower by a factor of 4 in...

Matching models are the primary and most popular theoretical tools used by economists to evaluate various labour market policies and to study the problem of unemployment. These notes mean to provide an exhaustive introduction to the study of the benchmark macroeconomic models of the labour market.

This paper looks at some of the fundamental ideas in contemporary economics such as the basic economic problem, opportunity cost and allocation a person is expected to encounter when they are first introduced to economic theory. It attempts to explain how the manner in which these concepts are...

In this paper, we propose a matching and search model with adjustment costs in the form of labor disruption charges that can generate counter-cyclical real wages. Empirically, we use a measure of wage cyclicality based on the generalized impulse response function of real wages to a shock in a...

An extensive empirical literature has documented that workers with high tenure suffer large and persistent earnings losses when they get displaced. We study the reasons behind these losses in a tractable search model with a life-cycle dimension, endogenous job mobility, worker- and...

In this paper, we explore the fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies in the Italian labour market over the last twenty years. For reasons of data availability on unfilled job openings, this period is split in two parts. The former is covered by a help-wanted time series, while the latter is...