In the conventional textbook demand-supply model of competitive labour markets, introduction of a minimum wage above the market-clearing level must reduce employment. Empirical findings suggest, however, that this might not always be the case, which appears to be most readily explained by...

In the conventional textbook demand-supply model of competitive labour markets, introduction of a minimum wage above the market-clearing level must reduce employment. Empirical findings suggest, however, that this might not always be the case, which appears to be most readily explained by...

Separating seasonal components from other sources of economic fluctuations is crucial for both economic modeling and policy making. Practitioners treat seasonality as noise to be removed before estimating models and tend to apply deseasonalizing methods i

In this study standard Mincer earnings equations are estimated using both ordinary least squares (OLS) and quantile regression in order to give a comprehensive picture of the returns to education in Germany and Hungary for the year 2000. To make the cross-country comparison of the returns to...

Using village date from Tanzania, we test whether gifts and loans between households are voluntary while correcting for mis-reporting by the giving and receiving households. Tow maintained assumptions underlie our analysis: answers to a question on who people would turn to for help are good...

This paper was commissioned by DG ECFIN from the EU Commission as part of the "EMU@10" project and is published in Hungarian language by the permission of the EU Commission. The original English language version of the paper is available at:...

This paper improves the analysis of the role of financial frictions in the transmission of monetary policy, by bringing together the borrowers' balance sheet channel with an additional channel working through bank capital, considering capital adequacy regulations and households' preferences for...

We investigate, theoretically and empirically, the relationship between monetary policy and the term structure of interest rates. In particular, we show in a dynamic macroeconomic model that if monetary policy reveals information about economic developments, interest rates of all maturities move...

In a simple dynamic macroeconomic model, it is shown that uncertainty about structural parameters does not necessarily lead to more cautious monetary policy, refining the accepted wisdom concerning the effects of parameter uncertainty on optimal policy. In particular, when there is uncertainty...

In spite of being mainly concerned with stabilization policies, central banks in many developed countries often advocate the necessity of structural reforms. In turn, demand-side policies - such as monetary policy - can often help improving the political support of reforms (two-handed-approach)....