Dollarization brought economic stability to Ecuador and higher economic growth. The labor market has not reacted accordingly and unemployment rates remain stubbornly around 10%. I use a simple econometric model of the labor market to disentangle the impact on employment of GDP growth, real...

This paper develops a political economy model of multiple unemployment equilibria to provide a theory of an endogenous natural rate of unemployment. This model is applied to the UK and the US interwar period which is remembered as the decade of mass unemployment. The theory here sees the natural...

Most treatments of the Great Depression have focused on its onset and its aftermath. In contrast, we take a unified view of the interwar period. We look at the slide into and the emergence from the 1920-21 recession and the roaring 1920s boom, as well as the slide into the Great Depression after...

Our small empirical stock-flow model for the Dutch economy, which endogenizes the adjustment dynamics to (un)employment search equilibria, identifies two mechanisms that caused persistente in labor market adjustments: (i) job competition from non-participants, and (ii) asymmetrie adjustments to...

The global financial crisis which emerged in developed countries has spread to the developing world. Forecasts of growth in developing countries have been downgraded a lot and questions remain as to how profound, for how long these problems will broaden which countries will be affected more than...

We develop an empirical nonlinear model of equilibrium unemployment and test its policy implications for a number of OECD countries. The model here sees the natural rate and the associated equilibrium path of unemployment as endogenous, pushed by the interaction of shocks and the institutional...

A major development in the Canadian labour market in the 1990s has been the decline in labour force participation. This issue of Canadian Business Economics consists of a symposium of articles that explore this issue. The idea for this symposium came out of a December 1997 workshop on labour...

As asserted in standard literature, there is an implicit circular relationship between the productivity growth and the potential level of production (and, consequently, the estimation of the natural rate of unemployment is also altered). In order to avoid such emerging impediment in any...

Economic theory tells that a command system allocates resources poorly because of the impossibility of economic calculation. Therefore, once prices are freed and start to operate at quasi-equilibrium (market-clearing) levels, the hidden inefficiencies come into the open and a massive resource...

Vielfach wurde Deutschland in der Vergangenheit durch die Medien als „Exportweltmeister“ bezeichnet. Die aktuelle Diskussion in Hinblick auf die von Hans-Werner Sinn aufgestellte Basarökonomiethese befasst sich mit der Frage nach der Vorteilhaftigkeit dieses Titels für Deutschland, zumal...