This paper analyzes rigidities in the behavior of mark-up on petroleum products in the New York area using a new set of high-frequency data. We use a methodology that accounts both for deterministic and stochastic nature of petrol prices. The results indicate that the adjustment to the long run...

Projections show public pensions to take an increasing share of GDP. This has lead to increased activity in the reform area and resulted in a plethora of reforms ranging from marginal to more radical ones. The former kind has often tried to hold back increasing expenditure by decreasing benefit...

According to theories of screening and signaling, a temporary worker who shows effort should increase the probability of obtaining a permanent contract. We use two types of signals of effort: overtime and low levels of absenteeism to investigate i) whether temporary workers show more effort and...

Heated discussions of the economic effects of the wealth tax have raged in the popular media in a number of European countries. The academic community has been considerably quieter, however. This paper attempts to fill this gap by empirically estimating the relationship between the wealth tax...

This paper empirically studies the effects of fiscal policy shocks on private consumption. Further, it tries to determine if the initial conditions of the economy, such as the financing needs of the government or previous fiscal deficits, affect that relationship. We use yearly data between 1970...

Recent empirical and theoretical studies have suggested that consumption growth reacts asymmetrically to positive and negative expected income growth. In this paper we investigate if this behavior is robust to a) assumptions on how the households form their expectations of future earnings and b)...

This paper summarizes and synthesizes some literature that picks up and extends the discussion of Dollar and Kraay (2000). While most of the theory has been known for a long time, the empirical material that has gradually become available in the past decade or so in the form of household budget...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of cross-sectional disturbance correlation on a previously suggested panel data stationarity test. We find that the previously suggested test has a serious size distortion if the disturbances to different cross sections are correlated. We suggest a new...

The purpose of this paper is to compare pension schemes with respect to their intergenerational redistributive effects caused by economic and demographic changes. It is shown how these effects depend on the specific design of the pension scheme, with special attention devoted to the indexation...

We examine Gray´s theory of endogenous length of wage contracts and inflation indexation, using a uniquely long data set of blue-collar worker collective agreements in Sweden 1908-1995. Volatile monetary regimes, i. e. regimes with large macroeconomic uncertainty, are associated with short...