Conventional wisdom suggests that nominal, demand-side shocks have only temporary effects on real macroeconomic magnitudes and that the duration of their effects depends on the degree of nominal inertia. It is also argued that, in the absence of unit roots, temporary supply-side shocks also have...

In Austria active job-search programs were introduced on a large scale in 1999. These programs aim at activating unemployed at an early stage and bringing them back to work by training job-search related skills. We evaluate the impact of active labour market programs in Austria on individual...

The paper attempts to establish a few stylised facts about Euroland's labour market given the increasing importance of smoothly functioning markets in the EMU. We assemble econometric evidence regarding labour demand behaviour, wage-setting mechanisms and the cyclicality of unemployment in...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labour market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

In this paper we challenge the traditional labour market view, which argues that unemployment is determined in the long-term by its equilibrium rate, which in turn is affected by permanent shocks of some exogenous variables. In our empirical approach we decompose the dynamics of employment and...

We show that equilibrium involuntary unemployment emerges in a multi-stage game model where all market power resides with firms, on both the labour and the output market. Firms decide wages, employment, output and prices, and under constant returns there exists a continuum of subgame perfect...

This note gives a brief survey of main theoretical and empirical issues with respect to the NAIRU concept. According to modern labour market literature NAIRU is defined as the rate of unemployment at which inflation stabilizes in the absence of any wage-price surprises. Conventional thinking...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

This paper investigates how parametric reform in a pay-as-you-go pension system with a tax benefit link affects retirement incentives and work incentives of prime-age workers. We find that postponed retirement tends to harm incentives of prime-age workers in the presence of a tax benefit link,...

The paper compares the cointegration methods of Johansen and Bierens by means of simulations and a real world example. Drawing on the fact developed in a companion paper that the Johansen procedure has robustness properties against ARMA systems and the Bierens procedure is designed for ARMA...