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Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

Despite stringent dismissal restrictions in most European countries, rates of job creation and destruction are remarkably similar across European and North American labor markets. This paper shows that relative-wage compression is conducive to higher employer-initiated job turnover, and argues that wagesetting institutions and job-security provisions differ across countries in ways that are both consistent with rough uniformity of job turnover statistics and readily explained by intuitive theoretical considerations. When viewed as a component of the mix of institutional differences in Europe and North America, European dismissal restrictions are essential to a proper interpretation of both similar patterns in job turnover and marked differences in unemployment flows.

This paper considers an economy where inequality originates from exogenous `talent' or `market luck' shocks and is transmitted over time by the same saving decisions that determine the aggregate rate of accumulation. The resulting interactions between factor- and personal-income distribution are studied in the light of existing analytic results from the precautionary-savings literature, and by numerical solution experiments. Aggregate savings are an increasing function of non-accumulated income variability, as individuals try to self-insure by accumulating wealth. In dynamic general equilibrium, however, non-accumulated income flows (`wages') depend endogenously on aggregate wealth accumulation. The level and/or the anticipated growth rate of wages affect microeconomic saving decisions so as to induce remarkable stability of long-run accumulated wealth distributions across parameter sets.

The radical liberalization of foreign trade in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 has been a key part of the economic reform and has been accompanied by a full-scale geographical reorientation of international trade from East to West. Increased trade with the EU has been associated with remarkably little change in the structure of that trade, which suggests that policy should be oriented towards facilitating rather than slowing industrial adjustment. Future trade policy priorities should include continued liberalization, better coordination of trade and exchange rate policy, the attraction of foreign direct investment, resistance to pressures for selective protection, further development of trade relations with the EU and of intra-regional trade relations, and full participation in the WTO.

We explore the effects of official targeting policy on the term-structure of nominal interest rates, adapting relevant insights from theoretical work on "peso problems" to account for realistic infrequency of target changes. Our analysis of daily U.S. interest rates and newly available historical targets provides an interpretation for persistent spreads between short-term money-market rates and overnight fed-funds targets, and for the poor performance of expectations-hypothesis tests: it is the policy-induced component of fed funds dynamics that appears to be erroneously anticipated by the market. Still, allowance for serial correlation in target changes makes it possible to extract from interest-rate data an expected-knoll series which is quite consistent with the assumptions of the model, indicating that some features of the interest-rate-targeting process are incorporated by market expectations.

Economic integration and free factor mobility may be expected to enhance the growth performance of a united Europe. Simple models of integration among independent, endogenously-growing economic entities suggest that factor mobility may deepen rather than reduce regional differences in economic performance, however. This paper studies interactions between static geographical externalities and dynamic investment decisions, and it finds that economic integration need not result in more efficient factor allocations or faster growth.

The effect of labour turnover costs on average employment in a partial equilibrium model of labour demand, depends on the form of the revenue function, on the rates of discount and labour attrition, and on the relative size of hiring and firing costs. If discount and attrition rates are strictly positive, firing costs may well increase average employment even when hiring costs reduce it.

The authors propose and solve an optimizing model that explains counterintuitive effects of fiscal policy in terms of expectations. If government spending follows an upward-trending stochastic process that the public believes may fall sharply when it reaches specific "trigger" points, then optimizing consumption behavior and simple budget-constraint arithmetic imply a nonlinear relationship between private consumption and government spending. Th is theoretical relation is consistent with the experience of several countries. Copyright 1993 by American Economic Association.

Investment is often irreversible, in that installed capital has little or no value unless used in production. In the presence of ongoing uncertainty, an individual firm's irreversible investment policy optimally alternates short bursts of positive gross investment to periods of inaction, when the installed capital stock is allowed to depreciate. The behavior of aggregate investment series is characterized by sluggish, continuous adjustment instead. We argue in this paper that aggregate dynamics should be interpreted in terms of unsynchronized irreversible investment decisions by heterogenous firms, rather than in terms of ad-hoc adjustment cost functions in a representative-agent framework. We propose a closed-form solution for a realistic model of sequential irreversible investment, characterize the aggregate implications of microeconomic irreversibility and idiosyncratic uncertainty, and interpret U.S. data in light of the theoretical results.

In models of steady investment-driven growth, an individual's propensity to save depends on how much of his income is drawn from accumulated factors of production ('capital') rather than from nonaccumulated factors. When agents are heterogeneous in this respect, growth-oriented policies have distributional consequences and, in the absence of lump-sum redistribution, their implementation faces political constraints. If the median voter is capital-poor relative to the economy's representative agent, political interactions tend to slow down growth when policy acts on capital's income share and tend to accelerate it when investment subsidies are the policy instrument of choice. Copyright 1993 by American Economic Association.

Recently developed models of exchange rate dynamics emphasize the expectational effects of infrequent intervention. This paper proposes a stylized probabilistic framework in which such effects can be studied along with realistic concerns about the sustainability of the intervention policy. In this framework, the level of reserves determines the extent to which non-linear intervention affects the level of exchange rates and their sensitivity to movements in fundamentals. We show that all such effects are absent when the possible reserve levels are weighted by their long-run probabilities.