A growing body of evidence has documented the critical role that entrepreneurs play in fostering economic growth. But entrepreneurs can only be expected to take risks in ‘open settings’, where individuals and firms are free to contract with one another. In this important book,...

We extend the efficiency wage model of Shapiro and Stiglitz to account for the observation that workers’ effort has a tendency to fall when they approach the end of their employment contract. In particular, we find that the efficiency wage increases when the end of term approaches for a given...

Floating exchange rates allow central banks to respond to aggregate demand fluctuations by changing their interest rates. However, such fluctuations create inertia in the labour market by increasing the cost of hiring and firing workers. A regime of flexible exchange rates can cause rigidities...

This paper derives the relationship between central bank interest rates and exchange rates under a capital control regime. Higher interest rate may strengthen the currency by reducing consumption and imports and by inducing foreign owners of local currency assets not to sell local currency off...

The Nordic countries are known for their success in combining an extensive welfare state with high labor force participation. This is explained by the origins and organization of their welfare states, which can be traced to a set of values and beliefs that emphasize the right of women to...

We estimate the Feldstein-Horioka equation for the period 1960-2012 and find structural breaks that coincide with the introduction of the European single market in 1993, the introduction of the euro in 1999 and the financial crisis in 2008. The results suggest that the correlation between...

Two issues; the liberalisation of labour markets and monetary unification, have taken centre stage in policy debates on the future of the European Union. We show that both have the effect of raising capital mobility as well as labour-market flexibility. The reduction of exchange-rate...

Using data for the years 1991-96 from the British Household Panel Survey, the authors investigate how union coverage affected work-related training and how the union-training link affected wages and wage growth for a sample of full-time men. Relative to non-covered workers, union-covered workers...

The literature on unemployment dynamics is mainly concerned with the nature and impact of shocks to unemployment. In this paper we use OECD unemployment data to infer the nature of these shocks using factor analysis. We find that two Principal Components can account for a large part of the...