The OECD labor market has undergone major changes over the past two decades. The most evident of these changes is the rise in the number of job-seekers. In 1997, there were more than 35 million people unemployed in the OECD area as a whole, some 6 million more than in the mid-1980s and almost 25...

The paper was produced as a background paper on labor issues for the UNDP study Convergence to the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities. It first looks at the issue of how the labor market institutions of an acceding country like Macedonia should be shaped to further the integration of...

We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with employment risk and labor market search in order evaluate the effects of labor market reform on unemployment, growth, and welfare. The model has a large number of risk-averse households who can invest in risk-free physical capital and risky human...

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of recent reforms of German employment promotion policy. While several recent studies analyze the impact of measures of employment promotion for the case of Germany, no comparable study exists on the aggregate level, thus precluding any assessment of...

Using a newly constructed macroeconometric model for Germany and the rest of the Euro area, we investigate the macroeconomic effects of structural labor market reforms in Germany. We find that neither the fact that Germany can no longer pursue an independent monetary policy nor the possibility...

The financial crisis and Great Recession have prompted a rethink of monetary policy and central banking. The status quo insider rethink focuses on the role of monetary policy in dealing with asset bubbles; making the central bank the banking system supervisor; and how to deal with the problem of...