Medium- to long-term changes in unemployment appear to be closely correlated with medium- to long-term changes in private investment. This becomes a puzzle once we abandon the Keynesian framework as an explanation for medium-term movements in unemployment and replace it with the natural-rate...

The trend in most of the industrialized counties is in the direction of decreasing labor force participation of older workers. The steady withdrawal of workers from the workforce at a younger age suggests that retirement income is gradually increasing and/or that older workers are increasingly...

Externalities caused by human capital accumulation have taken up considerable space in theoretical work on economic growth. However, less attention has been paid to this externality in traditional growth accounting exercises. This paper takes up the issue of growth accounting, suggesting a...

The national-income account identity and the life-cycle theory of consumption together imply that the current account should be a function of the age structure. A country with a high proportion of young and retired should have current account deficits. Using a panel of 84 countries, we find...

A fundamental problem for an economy based on a common property resource is the absence of a market to trade the resource. This implies that private costs are below social costs. This paper investigates possible government interventions that correct for such distortions in a neoclassical growth...

The withdrawal of older workers from the labor force creates a variety of economic challenges, including an increase in unused production capacity. Costs due to early retirement measured in terms of forgone output averaged 6.3 percent of potential gross domestic product in the OECD in 1998....

The multivariate technique of factor analysis is used to combine several indicators of economic integration and international transactions into a single measure or index of globalization. The index is an alternative to the simple measure of openness based on trade, and it produces a ranking of...

This article suggests how state enterprises can be incorporated into the theoretical and empirical growth literature. Specifically, it shows that if state enterprises are less efficient than private firms, invest less, employ less skilled labor, and are less eager to adopt new technology, then a...

The analysis provides a new explanation for two widespread problems concerning European unemployment policy: the disappointingly small effect of many past reform measures on unemployment, and the political difficulties in implementing more extensive reform programs. We argue that the heart of...

We show how changes in the educational composition of the labour force affect both the level and the behaviour over time of aggregate unemployment series. We also demonstrate that if it had not been for such changes, the U.S. unemployment series would look European since the within-group...