This paper analyzes the stabilizing properties of alternative monetary policy regimes. In practice there is a choice between two broad types of monetary policy regimes: a fixed exchange rate regime or a floating exchange rate regime. In this paper I compare exchange rate targeting with different...

Disability insurance - the insurance against the loss of the ability to work - is a substantial part of social security expenditures in many countries. The benefit recipiency rates in disability insurance vary strikingly across European countries and the US. This paper investigates the extent...

In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of Employment Protection Legislation...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...

One of the most frequently expressed concerns about the unprecedented economic boom that Ireland experienced in the second half of the 1990s has been that the benefits were not shared evenly, that rising living standards were accompanied by widening gaps leaving Ireland with a particularly...

Über die Methoden, die in anderen Industriestaaten bei der Steuerschätzung angewandt werden, ist in Deutschland sehr wenig bekannt. Es gibt weder einschlägige Literatur, noch findet ein Informationsaustausch zwischen den Steuerschätzern der einzelnen Staaten statt. Um die bestehende...

In this note, I examine how the responsiveness of the Swedish public budget to business-cycle conditions has developed between 1998 and 2009. I document substantial changes in three components behind the budget elasticity: (i) the average level of personal income taxes has fallen substantially,...

The main characteristic of the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) is the transition from various national currencies to the Euro, the common European currency. A final fixing of the individual bilateral exchange rates of all European countries involved in the Monetary Union...

Die im Maastricht-Vertrag festgelegten Konvergenzkriterien sowie die gegenwärtig in der EU-Kommission diskutierten Zielvorstellungen eines generellen Budgetausgleichs stellen finanzpolitische Restriktionen für alle EU-Mitgliedstaaten und ihre Gebietskörperschaften dar. Insbesondere machen sie...

Vor dem Hintergrund der noch nicht konkret ausformulierten Konsolidierungsstrategie der österreichischen Bundesregierung sowie den ernst zu nehmenden konjunkturpolitischen Bedenken gegen eine forcierte Budgetkonsolidierung stellt sich die Frage, wie eine Erfolg versprechende mittelfristige,...