The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 has had significant effects on economic activity, unemployment, and public finances for all European countries. However, European economies do not form a homogenous region, and any serious analysis of macroeconomic imbalances in Europe must account...

The welfare state is not merely a stand-in for missing markets; it can do a whole lot more. When generations overlap and the young must borrow to make educational investments, a dynamically-efficient welfare state, by taxing the middle-aged and offering a compensatory old-age pension, can...

High unemployment and its social and economic consequences have lent urgency to the question of how to improve unemployment insurance in bad times without jeopardizing incentives to work or public finances in the medium term. A possible solution is a rule-based system that improves the...

Approaching demographic shifts are raising concerns about fiscal sustainability in most OECD countries. A widespread view based on the tax-smoothing idea is that a prior consolidation of public finances is required to cope with the predicted trend deterioration in the primary budget balance....

The price adjustment process is crucial to almost any macroeconomic issue. Current macroeconomic literature freatures widely different models ranking from instantaneous price adjustment to completely rigid prices. Professor Andersen provides a comprehensive analysis of reasons why prices may...

[eng] Uncoordinated prices and monetary policy . Torben M. Andersen. The paper considers coordination problems and the role for monetary policiy within a setting where the traditional assumption of instantaneous market clearing (costless coordination) is given up in favour of a more realistic...

European integration is likely to affect labour market performance through various routes. One important channel is the effects product market integration has on labour markets. This paper reviews how product market integration may strengthen labour market interdependencies between integrating...

Globalization in the form of product market integration affects labour markets and produces winners and losers. While there are aggregate gains, it is in general ambiguous how inequality is affected. We explore this issue in a Ricardian model and show that it depends on the balance between...

Challenges raised by ageing (increasing longevity) have prompted policy debates featuring policy proposals justified by reference to some notion of intergenerational equity. However, very different policies ranging from pre-savings to indexation of retirement ages have been justified in this...