This overview discusses some key findings of the papers presented at the conference and draws some policy conclusions from them in the context of the broader literature. The papers and the wider academic discussion are sorted into three broad groups. The first looks at macroeconomic issues: The...

This paper reports the application of our new spatial computable general equilibrium (SCGE) model for analyzing the wider effects of strategic transport and land use development options. We examine the insights afforded by a SCGE model relative to those provided by existing land use and...

Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families. Yet the family (and decision-making in families) is...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of search and matching fric- tions in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting an otherwise standard real business cycle model a la Long and Plosser (1983) with both a two-sided costly search and fiscal policy. This introduces a...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of collective agreements in explaining uctuations in Bulgarian labor markets. Following Maffezzoli (2001), we introduce a monopoly union in a real-business-cycle model with government sector. We calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for...