Abstracts.

This section presents abstracts of several studies on economics. Giuseppe Bertola and Andrea Ichino, in Wage Inequality and Unemployment: United States vs. Europe, compare wage differentials and unemployment in the U.S. and Europe throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The implications of procyclical utilization rates for infererence regarding cyclical movements in labor productivity and the degree of returns to scale are studied by Craig Burnside, Martin Eichenbaum and Sergio Rebelo in Capital Utilization and Returns to Scale. The paper Real Effects of Exchange-Rate-Based Stabilization: An Analysis of Competing Theories, by Sergio Rebelo and Carlos A. Végh, uses a unified analytical framework to assess, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the relevance of the different hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the real effects of exchange-rate-based stabilizations.