Past research on labour-market skills shortages indicates that employers report skills shortages or hard-to-fill vacancies for a variety of different reasons. Nevertheless, there is some consensus that skills-shortages analysis needs to examine such shortages within the context of the local...

We examine the generating process for default risk premia in short-term and long-term debt sectors of the U.S. economy over the recent period of January 1977 through December 1996. Using weekly aggregates reported by the Federal Reserve, this research finds that all univariate series examined...