This paper documents the modes of organization of the budget process in ten CEEC and examines the relationship between these institutional settings and fiscal performance. Using detailed information on the budget institutions in these countries, the national budget processes are classified...

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...

Using the Albrecht et al. (2003) version of the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition technique along the wage distribution, we find that immigrant workers do not affect changes in the Czech wage structure between 2002 and 2006 despite their substantial inflows. Instead, changes in the wage...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state -space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component,...

This paper investigates a dynamic general equilibrium model with search. In particular, search externalities are reßected by an increasing returns to scale matching function, which may imply an indeterminate equilibrium. Hence, the model is capable to generate business ßuctuations, driven by...

This paper develops a model with multiple steady states (low tax and unemployment rate versus high tax and unemployment rate) in which equilibrium selection is not conditioned on a sunspot variable. Instead, large enough shocks initiate unavoidable transitions from one regime to the other. The...

We quantify the degree of persistence in unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. In part of the paper, we work with the concept of linear u0093Hysteresisu0094 as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment. Since this is...

The paper examines whether the pattern of growth in euro area employment seen in the period 1997-2001 differed from that recorded in the past and what could be the reasons for that. First, a standard employment equation is estimated for the euro area as a whole. This shows that the lagged impact...

This paper provides evidence for the impact of technology, labor supply, monetary policy and aggregate spending shocks on hours worked in the Euro area. The evidence is based on a vector autoregression identified using sign restrictions that are consistent with both sticky price and real...

This paper examines the issue of the impact of aggregation in the empirical analysis of euro area labour markets. A Phillips Curve describing the adjustment of unit labour costs is estimated at the national and aggregate level for the 5 largest euro area countries. Potential sources of...