This report presents the conclusions from a seminar on families and childcare services held in Ankara, Turkey, on 5 June 2008. The seminar was organised by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), in cooperation with the Turkish Ministry of Labour...

We compute public sector performance (PSP) and efficiency (PSE) indicators, comprising a composite and seven sub-indicators, for 23 industrialised countries. The first four sub-indicators are u0093opportunityu0094 indicators that take into account administrative, education and health outcomes...

A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to effcient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that incomplete asset markets and a low price elasticity of tradables can account...

The paper extends the standard intertemporal model of the current account to include two important stylised facts: (1) the persistence of current account positions and (2) the relevance of the fiscal balance. Specifically, the paper derives a closed form solution for consumption in the presence...

We live in a service economy, but the extent of development of service employment differs across developed countries. This paper assesses the role of structural factors and institutions in explaining the common patterns and main differences in the recent expansion of service employment in OECD...

This is a survey on the recent game theoretic literature on committee decision making. We consider theoretical work on the role of (i) strategic voting, (ii) costly information acquisition, (iii) conflicting interests, and (iv) communication in committees. Moreover, we review recent experimental...

This paper investigates the in inflationary effects of fscal policy in an optimizing general equilibrium monetary model with capital accumulation, exible prices and wealth effects. The model is calibrated to Euro Area quarterly data. Simulation results show that government defcits, high debt...

This paper examines the feasibility of implementing Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) Control in structural cointegrated VAR models and sheds some light on the two major problems generated by such implementation. The first aspect to be taken into account is the effect of the presence of unit roots...

A two-country sticky-price model is used to analyse the interactions between fiscal and monetary policy. The role of an u0091activistu0092 fiscal policy as a stabilisation tool is considered and a measure of the welfare gains from international fiscal policy cooperation is derived. It is found...

This paper investigates the performance of optimised interest rate rules when there is uncertainty about a key determinant of the monetary transmission mechanism, namely the degree of persistence characterising the inflation process. The paper focuses on the euro area and utilises two variants of...