Download or read book The Natural Survival of Work written by Pierre Cahuc and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2006 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to manage the unemployment that occurs in the process of the continuous job destruction and creation responsible for growth in today's economies: what recent economic research tells us about wages, incentives to work, and education.

Download or read book Why Wages Don t Fall during a Recession written by Truman F. BEWLEY and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deep question in economics is why wages and salaries don't fall during recessions. This is not true of other prices, which adjust relatively quickly to reflect changes in demand and supply. Although economists have posited many theories to account for wage rigidity, none is satisfactory. Eschewing "top-down" theorizing, Truman Bewley explored the puzzle by interviewing--during the recession of the early 1990s--over three hundred business executives and labor leaders as well as professional recruiters and advisors to the unemployed. By taking this approach, gaining the confidence of his interlocutors and asking them detailed questions in a nonstructured way, he was able to uncover empirically the circumstances that give rise to wage rigidity. He found that the executives were averse to cutting wages of either current employees or new hires, even during the economic downturn when demand for their products fell sharply. They believed that cutting wages would hurt morale, which they felt was critical in gaining the cooperation of their employees and in convincing them to internalize the managers' objectives for the company. Bewley's findings contradict most theories of wage rigidity and provide fascinating insights into the problems businesses face that prevent labor markets from clearing. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Methods 3. Time and Location 4. Morale 5. Company Risk Aversion 6. Internal Pay Structure 7. External Pay Structure 8. The Shirking Theory 9. The Pay of New Hires in the Primary Sector 10. Raises 11. Resistance to Pay Reduction 12. Experiences with Pay Reduction 13. Layoffs 14. Severance Benefits 15. Hiring 16. Voluntary Turnover 17. The Secondary Sector 18. The Unemployed 19. Information, Wage Rigidity, and Labor Negotiations 20. Existing Theories 21. Remarks on Theory 22. Whereto from Here? Notes References Index Reviews of this book: In Why Wages Don't Fall During A Recession, [Truman Bewley] tackles one of the oldest, and most controversial, puzzles in economics: why nominal wages rarely fall (and real wages do not fall enough) when unemployment is high. But he does so in a novel way, through interviews with over 300 businessmen, union leaders, job recruiters and unemployment counsellors in the north-eastern United States during the early 1990s recession...Mr. Bewley concludes that employers resist pay cuts largely because the savings from lower wages are usually outweighed by the cost of denting workers' morale: pay cuts hit workers' standard of living and lower their self-esteem. Falling morale raises staff turnover and reduces productivity...Mr. Bewley's theory has some interesting implications...[and] has a ring of truth to it. --The Economist Reviews of this book: This contribution to the growing literature on behavioral macroeconomics threatens to disturb the tranquil state of macroeconomic theory that has prevailed in recent years...Bewley's argument will be hard for conventional macroeconomists to ignore, partly because of the extraordinary thoroughness and honesty with which he evidently conducted his investigation, and the sheer volume of evidence he provides...Although Bewley's work will not settle the substantive debates related to wage rigidity, it is likely to have a profound influence on the way macroeconomists construct models. In particular, the concepts of morale, fairness, and money illusion are almost certain to play a big role in macroeconomic theory. His demonstration that there exist in reality simple, robust behavioral patters that cannot plausibly be founded on traditional maximizing behabior also raises the prospect of a more empirically oriented, more behavioral macroeconomics in the future. --Peter Howitt, journal of Economic Literature Reviews of this book: I think any scholar interested in labour markets and wage determination should read this well-written, lively, and highly stimulating book...[It] provides a fresh view and a lot of complementary background knowledge about how experienced people in the field see the employment relationship and what is actually crucial. Knowledge of this sort is all too rare in economics, and Truman Bewley's truly impressive study can serve as a role model for future investigations. --Simon G'chter, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics To call this book a breath of fresh air is an understatement. The direct insights are fascinating, and Truman Bewley's use of them is sharp and insightful. Labor economists and macroeconomists have a lot to think about. --Robert M. Solow, Nobel Laureate, Institute Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Truman Bewley set out to conduct a handful of interviews with business executives to gain some theoretical inspiration, and his project blossomed into over 300 interviews with business people, labor leaders and consultants. He is truly the accidental interviewer of economics. Time and again, he found that workers behave like people, not atomistic, selfish economic agents. His insights will engage and enrage economic theorists and empiricists for years to come. --Alan Krueger, Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University

Download or read book The Robustness and Real Consequences of Nominal Wage Rigidity written by Ernst Fehr and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dominant Currency Paradigm A New Model for Small Open Economies written by Camila Casas and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer’s currency or in local currency. We model instead a ‘dominant currency paradigm’ for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a dominant currency; pricing complementarities, and imported input use in production. Under this paradigm: (a) the terms-of-trade is stable; (b) dominant currency exchange rate pass-through into export and import prices is high regardless of destination or origin of goods; (c) exchange rate pass-through of non-dominant currencies is small; (d) expenditure switching occurs mostly via imports, driven by the dollar exchange rate while exports respond weakly, if at all; (e) strengthening of the dominant currency relative to non-dominant ones can negatively impact global trade; (f) optimal monetary policy targets deviations from the law of one price arising from dominant currency fluctuations, in addition to the inflation and output gap. Using data from Colombia we document strong support for the dominant currency paradigm.

Download or read book International Dimensions of Monetary Policy written by Jordi Galí and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United States monetary policy has traditionally been modeled under the assumption that the domestic economy is immune to international factors and exogenous shocks. Such an assumption is increasingly unrealistic in the age of integrated capital markets, tightened links between national economies, and reduced trading costs. International Dimensions of Monetary Policy brings together fresh research to address the repercussions of the continuing evolution toward globalization for the conduct of monetary policy. In this comprehensive book, the authors examine the real and potential effects of increased openness and exposure to international economic dynamics from a variety of perspectives. Their findings reveal that central banks continue to influence decisively domestic economic outcomes—even inflation—suggesting that international factors may have a limited role in national performance. International Dimensions of Monetary Policy will lead the way in analyzing monetary policy measures in complex economies.

Download or read book Optimal Unemployment Insurance written by Andreas Pollak and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2007 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designing a good unemployment insurance scheme is a delicate matter. In a system with no or little insurance, households may be subject to a high income risk, whereas excessively generous unemployment insurance systems are known to lead to high unemployment rates and are costly both from a fiscal perspective and for society as a whole. Andreas Pollak investigates what an optimal unemployment insurance system would look like, i.e. a system that constitutes the best possible compromise between income security and incentives to work. Using theoretical economic models and complex numerical simulations, he studies the effects of benefit levels and payment durations on unemployment and welfare. As the models allow for considerable heterogeneity of households, including a history-dependent labor productivity, it is possible to analyze how certain policies affect individuals in a specific age, wealth or skill group. The most important aspect of an unemployment insurance system turns out to be the benefits paid to the long-term unemployed. If this parameter is chosen too high, a large number of households may get caught in a long spell of unemployment with little chance of finding work again. Based on the predictions in these models, the so-called "Hartz IV" labor market reform recently adopted in Germany should have highly favorable effects on the unemployment rates and welfare in the long run.

Download or read book The Costs and Benefits of Price Stability written by Martin Feldstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the Federal Reserve and central banks worldwide have enjoyed remarkable success in their battle against inflation. The challenge now confronting the Fed and its counterparts is how to proceed in this newly benign economic environment: Should monetary policy seek to maintain a rate of low-level inflation or eliminate inflation altogether in an effort to attain full price stability? In a seminal article published in 1997, Martin Feldstein developed a framework for calculating the gains in economic welfare that might result from a move from a low level of inflation to full price stability. The present volume extends that analysis, focusing on the likely costs and benefits of achieving price stability not only in the United States, but in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom as well. The results show that even small changes in already low inflation rates can have a substantial impact on the economic performance of different countries, and that variations in national tax rules can affect the level of gain from disinflation.

Download or read book Designing a Simple Loss Function for Central Banks written by Davide Debortoli and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. This paper studies how to design simple loss functions for central banks, as parsimonious approximations to social welfare. We show, both analytically and quantitatively, that simple loss functions should feature a high weight on measures of economic activity, sometimes even larger than the weight on inflation. Two main factors drive our result. First, stabilizing economic activity also stabilizes other welfare relevant variables. Second, the estimated model features mitigated inflation distortions due to a low elasticity of substitution between monopolistic goods and a low interest rate sensitivity of demand. The result holds up in the presence of measurement errors, with large shocks that generate a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and resource utilization, and also when ensuring a low probability of hitting the zero lower bound on interest rates.

Download or read book Fiscal Consolidation and Public Wages written by Juin-Jen Chang and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Keynesian model with government production, public compensation, and unemployment is fit to U.S. data to study the macroeconomic and fiscal effects of public wage reductions. We find that accounting for the type of government spending is crucial for its macroeconomic implications. Although reductions in public wages and government purchases of goods have similar effects on total output and the fiscal balance, the former can raise private output slightly, in contrast to the substantial contractionary effects of the latter. In addition, the baseline estimation finds that exogenous public wage reductions decrease private wages. Model counterfactuals show that sufficiently rigid nominal private wages can reverse the response of private wages, as the rigidity dampens the labor reallocation effect from the public to private sector that exerts downward pressure on private wages.

Download or read book Employment Cost Index and Employee Benefits Survey written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Household Leverage and the Recession written by Callum Jones and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-08-30 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We evaluate and partially challenge the ‘household leverage’ view of the Great Recession. In the data, employment and consumption declined more in states where household debt declined more. We study a model where liquidity constraints amplify the response of consumption and employment to changes in debt. We estimate the model with Bayesian methods combining state and aggregate data. Changes in household credit limits explain 40 percent of the differential rise and fall of employment across states, but a small fraction of the aggregate employment decline in 2008-2010. Nevertheless, since household deleveraging was gradual, credit shocks greatly slowed the recovery.

Download or read book Wages Regime Switching and Cycles written by Piero Ferri and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The initial purposes of this book were to update and extend the discussion and the results presented ill our previous book, The Labor Market and Business Cycle Theories. Our 1990 article, which appeared in The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, represented a first step in this direction. The consequences of this effort have materialized in a number of new chapters that has led de facto to a new book, in which the surviving parts have been largely revised. The 1989 book was too mathematically oriented for many Keynesians and post Keynesians to be fully appreciated and insufficiently microfounded for both new classicals and new-Keynesians to be warmly accepted, yet we received positive and encouraging comments, and it was sold out very quickly. It was an attempt to dis cuss dynamics in Keynesian terms, based on a double assumption that maintains its validity-that both economic facts and analytical and methodological innova tions had contributed to a renewed interest in business cycles, which over time has had its "ups and downs." Since then, many more articles and books have appeared, stressing in particular the role of microfoundations and of nonlinearities in shaping business cycle theory.

Download or read book Handbook of Labor Economics written by Orley Ashenfelter and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 1999-11-18 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the continually evolving field of labour economics.

Download or read book Sticky Prices in the Euro Area written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Price Rigidity written by Torben M. Andersen and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1994 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The price adjustment process is crucial to almost any macroeconomic issue. Current macroeconomic literature features widely different models ranking from instantaneous price adjustment to completely rigid prices. Professor Andersen provides a comprehensive analysis of reasons why prices may fail to adjust instantaneously to changes in market conditions. This unified treatment will allow the reader to understand the mechanisms at work without becoming lost in technical details. This volume covers both real and nominal price rigidities and integrates existing results from the literature with new results on causes for failures of price adjustment. The analysis of real price rigidities includes inventories, customer markets, search and collusive behaviour. Due to the focus on macroeconomic implications, the analysis of nominal price rigidities is extensive and includes menu costs, informational problems, asynchronized price setting as well as the interaction between price and wage setting. Professor Andersen's own theoretical work on imperfect information, a prime source of price and wage rigidity, is given prominence in the book. The volume is thus a combination of a valuable survey of the literature, and an original expression of future possible research avenues.

Download or read book Collective Bargaining and Wage Formation written by Hannu Piekkola and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-12-06 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannu Piekkola and Kenneth Snellman ETLA, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, Helsinki, Finland The Labour Institute for Economic Research, Helsinki, Finland 1 The Basic Issues Wages have traditionally been agreed on collectively in Europe. The articles in this volume examine the current state of collective bargaining as well as the ch- lenges it is currently facing. The issues examined in these papers have a wide applicability to problems on the European labour markets. Torben M. Andersen and Steinar Holden review challenges from globalisation and inter-industry trade and the adaptation to a low-inflation environment. The other contributions are part of the project investigating collective bargaining in Finland, carried out by ETLA (the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy) and the Labour Institute for E- nomic Research. Some of them use results from a Finnish survey carried out by the two institutes ETLA and the Labour Institute on the views of employers and employees about labour relations and the labour market negotiation system. Bargaining systems are complex and their future development depends on their historical evolution, recent and past experiences, and the current situation in the labour market, as well as changes in the international environment. By examining the past functioning of the bargaining system one can observe how different e- ments in it have interacted with various factors in the environment of the system.

Download or read book A Behavioral Account of the Labor Market written by Ernst Fehr and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: