Finnish unemployment rose in the early 1990s from 3% to 18% in just four years. It has since fallen back to the average European level, being 9.0% in January 2003. In this paper, we describe the shocks leading to this unforeseen increase in unemployment. We then discuss and research the role of...

This paper develops an overlapping-generations model characterized by endogenous growth, unemployment, and pollution. The paper focuses on the replacement ratio, which measures the proportion of after-tax work earnings replaced by unemployment benefits, and considers a replacement-ratio-neutral...

We develop a two-country labour-market model characterised by union wage-bargaining, in which the unemployed incur individual-specific costs of seeking work abroad. We explore the effects on equilibrium unemployment in each country of changes in union bargaining strength, the ratio of...

In this paper, we use panel data from 1971 to 1985 to test the hypothesis that differences in monetary and wage institutions can explain a significant fraction of the variations in the macroeconomic performance of 10 OECD countries following the OPEC shocks of 1973-74 and 1979-80. After...

The Okun law for Andalusia and Spain is estimated using quarterly data (1984-2000). We take a VAR approach that allows us to unveil the different dynamic behaviour of the relationship between the output gap and the unemployment gap in the two economies, as well as the asymmetric nature of that...

The issues of business cycles assessment and most of all forecasting turning points represent crucial components in the game of crisis anticipation. The aim of this study is to statistically evaluate the predictive power of several macro economic variables in estimating economic changes and to...

The electoral instability falls into the continuous shifts in paradigms, systems, values and economic performance which countries around the world still experience. We believe it is common sense that the election process in a democratic country has an important impact (even a manipulation...

This paper is aimed at investigating the effects of government intervention through unemployment benefits on macroeconomic dynamics in an agent based decentralized matching framework. The major result is that the presence of such a public intervention in the economy stabilizes the aggregate...