This brief reviews the evolution of the US and the European labour markets since the beginning of the financial crisis. In the US, the unemployment rate and the share of long-term unemployment grew very fast, during the crisis, thereby reaching levels close to those in the EU. Does that mean...

We evaluate the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis that a more accommodative monetary policy could have greatly reduced the severity of the Great Depression. To do this, we first estimate a dynamic, general equilibrium model using data from the 1920s and 1930s. Although the model includes eight...

This Country Focus discusses the relation between public investment and economic growth in Poland. Theoretical and empirical work has shown that improvements in the quantity and quality of public infrastructure have a positive impact on growth in the medium and, possibly, in the long run. The...

Following several years of low growth Germany is presently enjoying a relatively strong recovery. With unemployment falling at record speed and fiscal consolidation progressing, the upswing is set to continue in spite of uncertainties surrounding the VAT increase of January 2007. This Country...

The Czech financial sector has changed dramatically since transition. In fifteen years, it has developed from a state-owned mono-bank into a privatised bank-based financial system with developing capital and private equity markets. This country focus analyses the development of the financial...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...

Is free trade good for growth? Some of the most disturbing evidence to the contrary comes from a period that is often described as the first era of globalization. Studies of the period 1870-1914 have emphasised that protectionist tariff policy was associated with higher rates of economic growth....

Existing studies find little connection between living standards and mortality in England, but go back only to the sixteenth century. Using new data on inheritances, we extend estimates of mortality back to the mid-thirteenth century and find, by contrast, that deaths from unfree tenants to the...

Understandably, focus on a transition to a low carbon economy has overshadowed what happens when the transition has been completed. This paper tries to offer lessons about the very long run aspects of a future economy reliant predominantly on renewable energy sources. The evidence is based on...