Via the International Labour Market Forecasting Network, forecasters of the public employment services or comparable institutes from the Nordic countries as well as Germany and Austria exchange their analyses about the current and future development of the national economies and labour markets....

This paper provides an overview of the work of Herbert Simon and his ideas about rational decision making. By his own standards, Simon is an economist who works in the tradition of Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The central theme in Simon’s research is how human beings organize themselves in...

This paper investigates the impact of the recent global recession on European countries and regions. We first present several stylized facts as to the heterogeneous impact of the global recession on individual European countries and regions. We then offer an investigation of three main classes...

Since the end of the Great Recession in mid-2009, the unemployment rate has recovered slowly, falling by only one percentage point from its peak. We find that the lackluster labor market recovery can be traced in large part to weakness in aggregate demand; only a small part seems attributable to...

Recent economic developments highlight Latin America`s vulnerability to economic and financial turmoil that is triggered by events in distant corners of the globe. The Asian financial crisis that began in 1997 and the more recent Russian crisis have left the region profoundly shaken, and living...

This paper tests whether Rodrik`s (1999) results that institutions for conflict management are associated with the ability to react to economic shocks are robust to different ways of defining the quality of such institutions. We measure the quality of conflict management institutions with two...

This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission of international business cycles to Latin America. Evidence based on a GVAR model for five large Latin American economies shows that the long-term impact of...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically why and how labor policies may reduce productivity and employment in order to stabilize labor incomes and redistribute resources. It proposes a specific stylized model where the tradeoffs facing labor policies are influenced by structural factors,...

The key dynamics of the transatlantic banking crisis are analyzed - with emphasis on the fact that the banking disaster of 2007/08 was not really a surprise -, and the five key requirements for restoring stability and efficiency in the EU/OECD banking sector are highlighted. Most important,...