The paper provides interim results of my PhD dissertation. The research hypothesis is “Firms increase and decrease employment in response to changes in expected demand.” The paper seeks to answer the question “What are the determinants of changes in aggregate employment in the United...

Section 2 of the Sherman Act bans monopolization of any part of interstate commerce. This essay draws on macroeconomic theory and the New Deal experience with partial repeal of the antitrust laws and cartelization of labor to examine the relationship between macroeconomic stability and the...

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 evaluates the Prescott (2004) hypothesis that permanently higher payroll taxes fully explain the decline in number of market hours worked in Europe (relative to America) over three decades. The Prescott model made assumptions that, in steady state, left out any incentive for either...

It seems to be taken for granted by many commentators that the sharp decline in prices of computers, telecommunications equipment and software resulting from the technological improvements in the information and communications technology (ICT)-producing sector is good for jobs and is a major...

Arguments are developed concerning a number of topics including long-run monetary neutrality, superneutrality, the natural-rate hypothesis, the quantity theory of money, the equation of exchange, the Fisher equation, and purchasing power parity. These are basic, fundamental topics that all...

This paper studies the joint behaviour of inflation and unemployment in Spain over the period 1964–95 in order to estimate dynamic Phillips trade-offs and sacrifice ratios in response to a demand shock. We organize our empirical approach as a structural (albeit eclectic) one. In so doing, we...

From 1870 to 2000, the workweek length of employed persons decreased by 41 per cent in industrialized countries. The employment rate, employment per working age person, displays large movements but no clear secular pattern. This motivated the question: What accounts for the large decrease in the...

Empirical evidence shows that some firms may be capital constraint because of capital market imperfections. We therefore extend the business cycle models with frictions `a la Pissarides on the labour market by also introducing symmetric frictions on the capital market. We show that the capital...

In this paper we compare, in a fully consistent manner, micro and macro labor supply elasticities. The individual elasticity is obtained from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The aggregate, time-series, elasticity is estimated from the aggregation of individual units in the PSID for...