By assuming Cobb-Douglas production technology, many well-known imperfectlycompetitive macroeconomic models of the labour market (e.g. Layard, Nickell andJackman, 1991) imply that equilibrium unemployment is independent of the capitalstock. This paper introduces a new notion of capacity into the...

The influence of industrial structure, more specifically of business ownership, is investigated on the level of unemployment in Japan. The question is to what extent business ownership, i.e., entrepreneurship, can reduce the level of unemployment. It will be concluded that Japan is hardly an...

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower.While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertakeoriginal research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, thefollower must undertake...

In a neoclassical economy with endogenous capital- and labor-augmentingtechnical change the steady-state growth rate of output per worker is shown to increasein the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This conrms theassessment of Klump and de La Grandville (2000) that the...

In 2000, the Lisbon Agenda set out an ambitious plan to make the EuropeanUnion “the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy inthe world”. The Agenda suggested a need for action on three broad fronts:the first explicitly macroeconomic; the second explicitly microeconomic;the third...

Differences in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large andpersistent. We show that inherited variation in human-capital endowment across the regionsof four such economies explains the bulk of regional unemployment variation there and weexplore potential explanations for this...

This paper analyzes the effect of firing costs on aggregate productivity growth. For thispurpose, a model of endogenous growth through selection and imitation is developed. It isconsistent with recent evidence on firm dynamics and on the importance of reallocation forproductivity growth...

We present a structural framework for the evaluation of public policies intended to increasejob search intensity. Most of the literature defines search intensity as a scalar that influencesthe arrival rate of job offers; here we treat it as the number of job applications that workerssend out....

We evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation andequilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market, where wages are determinedby a monopoly labour union. We find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion betweenthe high-skilled and low-skilled workers...

We study both the various consequences and the incentives of outsourcing. We argue thatthe wage elasticity of labour demand is increasing as a function of the share of outsourcing,which is importantly a result consistent with existing empirical research...