History teaches valuable lessons. This article examines the performance of the stock market during various boom and bust phases over the last forty years in the United States. By doing so, four previous manias and panics scenarios are analyzed, including the 1987 black Monday crash, the Dotcom...

This paper on Selected Issues was prepared by a staff team of the International Monetary Fund as background documentation for the periodic consultation with the member country. It is based on the information available at the time it was completed on October 23, 2012. The views expressed in this...

The reservation wage is an integral part of most theories of involuntary unemployment. We use panel data to examine the empirical determinants of the reservation wage - in particular the inßuence of previous wages - and consider what this implies for the evolution of the natural rate of...

We adopt a general equilibrium approach in order to measure the effects of recent immigration on the Western German labor market, looking at both wage and employment effects. Using the Regional File of the IAB Employment Subsample for the period 1987-2001, we find that the substantial...

This paper uses the Austrian Social Security Register (ASSD) to explore what information firms infer from the three common types of displacement: individual layoffs, individuals displaced due to a closure and individuals displaced due to a mass layoff. I bring together two strands of the...

This paper is concerned with the labor market experience of Swedish youths during the 1980s and the 1990s. The first objective is to portray early economic attainment among young Swedes. The second objective of the paper is to examine the impact of labor market programs on youth employment. We...

To examine the cyclical behavior of the skill-premium, this paper introduces implicit labor contracts in a DSGE model where production is characterized by capital-skill complementarity and the utilization of capital is endogenous. It is shown that this model can reproduce the observed cyclical...

This paper analyzes the effects of different wage cyclicalities on labor market flow dynamics at the establishment level. We derive a model that allows for heterogeneous wage cyclicalities across firms over the business cycle and confront the theoretical results with the new AWFP dataset, which...

This paper explores the incidence of job loss by wage level during the Great Recession, using data for Ireland. Ireland experienced a particularly pronounced decline in employment by international and historical standards, which makes it a valuable case study. Using EU Survey on Income and...