This paper investigates if conclusions regarding labour market hysteresis differ depending on whether employment or unemployment rates are studied. Applying a range of unit-root tests to monthly data from Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S., we find results for...

Employing econometric methods for univariate time series, this paper investigates the empirical validity of assuming a unit root in individuals' labor-income processes. Using a Swedish register-based longitudinal dataset which allows us to follow a cohort of workers from 1968 to 2005, we are...

The informational value of the aggregate US unemployment rate has recently been questioned because of a unit root in the labor-force participation rate; the lack of mean reversion implies that long-run changes in unemployment rates are highly unlikely to reflect long-run changes in joblessness....

This paper investigates the econometric properties of the Taylor (1993) rule applied to U.S., Australian and Swedish data to judge its empirical relevance. Little attention has been paid to the time series properties of the data underlying interest rate rules, nor the estimations themselves,...

Much of the information communicated by central banks is noisy or imperfect. This paper considers the potential benefits and limitations of central bank communications in a model of imperfect knowledge and learning. It is shown that the value of communicating imperfect information is ambiguous....

When dealing with time series that are integrated of order one, the concept of cointegration becomes crucial for the specification of a model. Using the best available tests, one can reduce the probability of estimating econometric models that are misspecified. This paper investigates the small...

In many markets, firms make their products complex through add-on features, thus making them difficult to evaluate and compare. Does this product obfuscation lure buyers into buying overpriced products, and if so, why does competition not eliminate this practice? More generally, under which...

We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically...

Are initial competitive advantages self-reinforcing, so that markets exhibit an endogenous tendency to be dominated by only a few firms? Although this question is of great economic importance, no systematic empirical study has yet addressed it. Therefore, we examine experimentally whether firms...

Previous experimental work provides encouraging support for some of the central assumptions underlying Hart and Moore (2008)'s theory of contractual reference points. However, existing studies ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and expost renegotiation....