Barriers to technological changes have recently been shown to be a key element in explaining differences in output per worker across countries. This study examines the role that labour market features and institutions have in explaining barriers to technology adoption. I build a model that...

A new model of unemployment based on an idea of Marx is presented and used to interpret the development of the British economy from the beginning of capitalism to the present. It is shown that unemployment may be created purposely by capitalists in order to weaken the bargaining position of the...

We study the relation between public capital, employment and growth under different assumptions concerning wage formation. We show that public capital increases economic growth, and that, if there is wage inertia, employment positively depends on both economic growth and public capital.

Using a representative panel of manufacturing firms, we estimate the response of job and hours worked to currency swings, showing that it depends primarily on the firm's exposure to foreign sales and its reliance on imported inputs. Further, we show that, for given international orientation, the...

The purpose of this paper is to offer an alternative explanation of the structural break in the time series on growth and unemployment in Canada and other Western countries since the mid-1970s. Unlike the traditional explanations provided by both neoclassical and radical economists that point...

In this paper, we use panel data from 1971 to 1985 to test the hypothesis that differences in monetary and wage institutions can explain a significant fraction of the variations in the macroeconomic performance of 10 OECD countries following the OPEC shocks of 1973-74 and 1979-80. After...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between inflation and unemployment in Australia, post 1959. We focus on two features of the data: firstly, we find that forecasting models are surprisingly stable through our sample period. We also estimate the nonaccelerating inflation rate of...

We examine the effects of public policy parameters in a simple directed search model of the labour market, and contrast them with those in standard random matching models with Nash bargaining. Both finite and limit versions of the directed search model are considered, and the value of the limit...

In this paper, panel data from 15 OECD countries (1971-1990) are used to test the hypothesis that differences in monetary and labour market institutions explain a significant portion of the surprisingly diverse inflation and unemployment experiences among similarly developed economies. As an...

The Fieller Method for the construction of confidence intervals for ratios of the expected value of two normally distributed random variables has been shown by a number of authors to be a superior method to the delta approximation. However, it is not widely used due in part, to the tendency to...