can we have growth when population is stagnant testing linear growth rate formulas of non scale endogenous growth models abstractwe sub divide scale invariant fully or semi endogenous growth models into six sub categories for formulas relating steady state growth rates of income per capita and the growth rate of the

wage norms capital accumulation and unemployment a post keynesian view the paper presents a post keynesian view of unemployment it argues first that the effective labour demand need not be downward sloping with respect to real wages and aggregate demand need not be downward sloping with respect to inflation second that there is a broad case for unemployment hysteresis understood as endogeneity of the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu based on social norms in wage bargaining and on the supply side effects of capital accumulation and third that much as keynes argued capital investment rather than labour market institutions is the key variable to explain changes in aggregate unemployment performance across countries and over time overall the paper advocates a keynesian view of the nairu where effective demand determines unemployment in the short run and the deviation of actual unemployment from the nairu determines the change in inflation in the medium term the nairu is endogenous and follows actual unemployment copyright 2011 oxford university press

a critical reconsideration of the foundations of monetary policy in the new consensus macroeconomics framework monetary policy has become firmly based on the use of interest rate as the key policy instrument and in a one instrument one target framework the approach to monetary policy is closely associated with the new consensus in macroeconomics ncm this paper undertakes a critical appraisal of the role of monetary policy in the context of the ncm after setting out the main features of the ncm there is critical discussion of the role of monetary policy and the ncm framework the discussion covers the nature of the loss function the role of the natural rate of interest and the phillips curve this is followed by a critical evaluation of the is curve in the ncm and the classical dichotomy the paper finishes by asking whether interest rates do have the effects claimed for them

how labour market flexibility affects unemployment long term implications of the chain reaction theory this paper evaluates two theories of unemployment the natural rate theory whereby unemployment is depicted as fluctuating around a reasonably stable natural rate and the chain reaction theory which views movements in unemployment as the outcome of the interplay between labour market shocks and a network of lagged adjustment processes we show that for labour market systems with two common characteristics lagged endogenous variables and growing exogenous variables lags affect unemployment not only in the short run but in the long run as well the reason is that in the presence of growing exogenous variables the lagged responses are never able to work themselves out entirely in this respect the chain reaction theory contrasts sharply with the natural theory which commonly views unemployment as approaching a natural rate determined solely by the values of the exogenous variables the policy implications of the two theories are quite different as well for an empirical model of the uk market we show that unemployment does not converge to the natural rate as conventionally defined furthermore we show that lagged adjustment processes account for a substantial part of the uk long run equilibrium unemployment rate and for the movement of uk unemployment over the past 15 years this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

factor substitution average firm size and economic growth this paper extends the lucas 1978 the bell journal of economics 9 2 508 523 analysis of firm size by taking into account a normalised aggregate ces production function in a general equilibrium framework it is proved that there is an inverse relation between the elasticity of substitution and average firm size if interpreted together with the fact that richer countries are characterised by a higher elasticity of substitution this result can explain why the recent literature finds a positive association between the importance of smes in an economy and its stage of development but seems to fail in finding causality between the two both have a common origin a high value of the elasticity of substitution this paper also provides a first empirical test of the theory proposed using cross country data from both developed and developing countries

tax evasion and heuristics a research note abstract the paper examines the heuristics which taxpayers use in making tax evasion decisions the following propositions are tested in an experiment using students first the taxpaper s own level of evasion will be positively related to what he perceives as the levels of evasion by others second taxpayers who have been audited are more likely to assess the probability of audit as higher and therefore decrease their levels of evasion the experimental results fail to support the first proposition but do support the second suggesting the presence of an availability effect

budgetary policy and unemployment dynamics in an olg model with collective bargaining we consider a dynamic general equilibrium model with capital accumulation and collective wage bargaining and investigate how unemployment responds to structural shocks under two stylised budgetary policies under balanced budgets tax adjustments lead to higher unemployment on impact but enable a quick recovery of employment by contrast unbalanced budgets mitigate unemployment effects on impact but dynamics are more persistent due to weaker capital accumulation and future fiscal consolidations these results are consistent with empirical evidence on a positive cross country relationship between government borrowing and unemployment persistence this paper starts out from the well known fact that many european countries have suffered from persistently high unemployment over the past two decades there is a large literature which attempts to explain this development as resulting from a combination of structural shocks and mechanisms which make the effects of any such shifts more persistent one prominent branch of this literature stresses that adverse structural shocks tend to induce a slowdown in capital accumulation which reinforces the employment losses and adds to unemployment persistence bean 1989 benassy 1997 blanchard 1997 burda 1988 caballero and hammour 1998 daveri and tabellini 2000 similarly these studies point out that when the shock is over the recovery of employment depends critically on the speed with which investments in capital respond to the new situation the purpose of this paper is to reconsider this capital shortage hypothesis by linking it explicitly to the stance of fiscal policy to see the importance of fiscal policy in this context consider a government which faces an adverse structural shock such as a drop in employment due to a wage setting shock and decides whether it should keep its budget balanced or not this decision will affect the overall structure of assets in the economy i e the mix between capital and government bonds and this mix will in turn be an important determinant of the speed with which the economy can create employment once the shock is over in particular according to the capital shortage hypothesis the recovery in terms of employment is likely to take longer under a policy which temporarily accepts structural budget deficits particularly when crowding out effects have been substantial

money income prices and interest rates including data from the 1980s sharply weakens the postwar time series evidence indicating significant relationships between money however defined and nominal income or between money and either real income or prices separately focusing on data from 1970 onward destroys this evidence altogether evidence indicating cointegration of real income and real money balances with due allowance for the effect of interest rates also deteriorates when the sample extends through the 1980s a positive finding is that the spread between the commercial paper rate and the treasury bill rate consistently contains highly significant information about future movements in real income copyright 1992 by american economic association

from the lab to the field a review of tax experiments tax experiments have been gaining momentum in recent years although this literature dates back several decades with new developments in methods and data availability tax experiments have gradually moved away from lab settings and towards the field this movement from the lab to the field has happened against the background of the credibility revolution in applied economics which has seen more rigorous methods applied to policy relevant questions and of the availability to researchers of administrative data from tax returns these developments have allowed significant advances in the experimental literature on tax compliance this paper reviews this literature giving particular attention to field experiments using administrative data but putting them in the broader context of the compliance literature a particular effort is made to take a global perspective in a literature that is only recently seeing the emergence of evidence from africa latin america and asia

flight to quality in banking and economic activity abstract recent explanations of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy have emphasized that riskier lower net worth borrowers are more dependent on bank lending than larger less risky borrowers evidence from the federal reserve s survey on terms of bank lending indicates that the proportion of relatively high quality new loans safe moves countercyclically and granger causes gdp and inventory investment in the aftermath of a tightening of monetary policy the safe variable increases and in turn policy tends to relax once safe has risen

social programs as positive inducements for tax participation a significant amount of non compliance with the personal income tax is due to individuals who have not filed a tax return and so who are not in the system we use experimental laboratory methods to examine the effect of positive inducements for filing a tax return our design captures the essential features of a voluntary income reporting and tax assessment system human participants earn income they must decide whether to file a tax return and conditional upon filing they must choose how much income to report taxes are paid on reported income only unreported income of filers may be discovered via a random audit and the participant then pays owed taxes plus a fine inducements for filing are introduced as treatments a social safety net e g unemployment replacement income that is conditional upon past filing behavior and a tax credit that is available only to those who file our results suggest that an untargeted tax credit can encourage participation but that targeting the credit to low income earners offers a stronger inducement to file also the provision of a social safety net via unemployment benefits has a positive albeit an indirect impact on participation

ces production functions and economic growth we examine inconsistencies and controversies related to the use of ces production functions in growth models first we show that not all variants of ces functions commonly used are consistently specified second using a simple growth model we find that a higher elasticity of substitution leads to a higher steady state and makes the emergence of permanent growth more probable it is also pointed out that the effect of a higher elasticity of substitution on the speed of convergence depends on the relative scarcity of the factors of production finally we discuss possible explanations of variations in the elasticity of substitution jel classification o41 o11

in search for yield survey based evidence on bank risk taking abstract monetary policy can have an impact on economic and financial stability through the risk taking of banks falling interest rates might induce investment into risky activities this paper provides evidence on the link between monetary policy and bank risk taking we use a factor augmented vector autoregressive model favar for the us for the period 1997 2008 besides standard macroeconomic indicators we include factors summarizing information provided in the federal reserve s survey of terms of business lending stbl these data provide information on banks new loans as well as interest rates for different loan risk categories and different banking groups we identify a risk taking channel of monetary policy by distinguishing responses to monetary policy shocks across different types of banks and different loan risk categories following an expansionary monetary policy shock small domestic banks increase their exposure to risk large domestic banks do not change their risk exposure foreign banks take on more risk only in the mid 2000s when interest rates were too low for too long

hysteresis in unemployment after two decades of ratcheting unemployment in europe most economists agree that structural changes associated with higher equilibrium rates of unemployment have occurred but the direction of causality is a matter of controversy have the structural changes caused the long lasting increases in actual unemployment or have the increases in actual unemployment caused the structural changes the latter possibility is often referred to as hysteresis during the past decade a distinct research program has evolved around the idea that equilibrium employment tracks actual unemployment this survey reviews the various hysteretic explanations offered in the literature and evaluates their empirical standing

unit roots and structural breaks in oecd unemployment abstract we apply unit root tests that allow for two endogenous break points in the unemployment rates of 26 oecd countries our results show that unit root tests that do not account for structural breaks are misspecified and suggest excessive persistence

ces technology and business cycle fluctuations we contribute to an emerging literature that brings the constant elasticity of substitution ces specification of the production function into the analysis of business cycle fluctuations using us data we estimate by bayesian maximum likelihood methods a standard medium sized dsge model with a ces rather than cobb douglas cd technology we estimate a elasticity of substitution between capital and labour well below unity at 0 15 0 18 in a marginal likelihood race ces decisively beats the cd production and this is matched by its ability to fit the data better in terms of second moments we show that this result is mainly driven by the implied fluctuations of factor shares under the ces specification the ces model performance is further improved when the estimation is carried out under an imperfect information assumption hence the main message for dsge models is that we should dismiss once and for all the use of cd for business cycle analysis

in quest of the slutsky diamond the slutsky equation can be constructed as a parallelogram a diamond the area of which is proportional to the elasticity of substitution this construction permits to show immediately that demand functions become concave on an interval if the elasticity of substitution increases sufficiently also the diamond sheds light on the fact that the production level increases with the elasticity of substitution as an application the author shows that the elasticity of substitution has a direct bearing not only on the rate of growth of an economy but also on the very existence of sustained growth copyright 1989 by american economic association

new measures of factor productivity in australia a sato approach this article derives new results of the elasticity of substitution es between capital and labour and factor productivity for australia an economy which experienced major economic reform that substantially increased the flexibility of its labour product and capital markets throughout the 1980s and 1990s it employs a sato production function specification which has unique properties that enable the estimation of capital labour substitution elasticity and changing marginal productivities through time these estimates reveal that the substitution elasticity and labour productivity in australia rose significantly from the mid 1960s and remained elevated during the economic reform period a novel contribution of this article is the depiction of australia s production isoquants to convey how combining labour and capital to produce real gross domestic product gdp has changed over recent decades

the long term success of the neoclassical growth model in this paper we seek to re establish the link between the constant elasticity of substitution ces production function and neoclassical solow growth theory we do so in three dimensions first we review the increasing importance of the ces technology in modern dynamic macroeconomics in expanding not only theory but also in addressing important policy questions second we aue that the importance of the ces function in growth theory is intimately linked to normalization finally we examine the data congruence between ces functions and recent growth patterns in the usa and the euro area economies where we apply a supply side system incorporating a ces function with factor augmenting and time varying technical progress

bank competition and credit standards this article offers an explanation for the substantial variation of credit standards and price competition among banks over the business cycle as the economic outlook improves the average default probabilities of borrowers decline this affects the profitability of screening and causes bank screening intensity to display an inverse u shape as a function of economic prospects low screening activity in expansions creates intense price competition among lenders and loans are extended to lower quality borrowers as the economic outlook worsens price competition diminishes and credit standards tighten significantly deposit insurance may contribute to the countercyclical variation of credit standards copyright 2004 oxford university press

the modern view of macroeconomics some critical reflections david romer has proposed a new basic macroeconomic framework the is mp ia model its proponents claim that it represents the modern view of macroeconomics we show that the new framework remains closely attached to the neoclassical synthesis and in addition does not take account of i the empirical evidence on the output inflation trade off ii the evidence on the interdependence of aggregate demand and supply iii the institutional limits of monetary policy and iv the implications for macroeconomic policy of i ii and iii once these aspects have been incorporated short run stabilisation policy is not neutral in the long run the notion of a natural rate of interest becomes untenable and aggregate demand turns into the crucial exogenous variable copyright 2005 oxford university press

the dynamics of credit markets in a model with learning abstract a dynamic credit market is modeled in which the production and processing of information leads to alternating and persistent periods of growth and contraction in the model the number of projects engaged in determines the precision of estimates of future returns obtained from current investment shocks to underlying returns to risky projects are magnified and prolonged by the learning process multiple equilibria may exist and the magnification effect may be even larger since shocks can move the credit market to a new equilibrium the allocation of credit is generally not a constrained pareto efficient allocation

monetary policy and bank lending in the euro area is there a stock market channel or an interest rate channel abstract in this paper i compare a traditional demand oriented model of bank lending with its focus on short term interest rates in the money market to a non traditional capital budgeting model of bank lending based on movements in share valuations for the euro area using non nested hypothesis tests omitted variables tests and granger causality tests i reject the traditional demand oriented model of bank lending and fail to reject the capital budgeting model of bank lending for monetary financial institutions mfi s in the euro area even though europe is a bank based financial system it appears the stock market plays a key role in the lending decisions and allocation of resources in europe one possible policy implication of this research is that the central bank should try and stabilize stock prices in order to achieve their goal of stabilizing bank lending and the economy

the impact of monetary policy on unemployment hysteresis this article investigates the hypothesis that the extent to which hysteresis occurs in the aftermath of recessions depends on monetary policy reactions the degree of hysteresis is explained econometrically by the extent of monetary easing during a recession and by standard variables for labour market institutions in a pooled cross country analysis using quarterly data the sample includes 40 recessions in 19 organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries for which the required data is available the time period lasts for the period from 1980 to 2007 this article builds on ball 1999 and extends the sample of countries the time period under investigation and the set of control variables

unemployment wage bargaining and capital labour substitution many economists believe that capital accumulation technical progress and labour force expansion have no lasting effect on unemployment this view rests on the empirically doubtful assumption that the elasticity of substitution between labour and capital is equal to unity i e production is cobb douglas using a simple model based on the work of layard nickell and jackman this paper demonstrates that with a lower elasticity of substitution the equilibrium unemployment rate is affected by all of the above factors it considers briefly how capital accumulation may be endogenised and what long run implications this has for unemployment copyright 1999 by oxford university press

capital accumulation and unemployment new insights on the nordic experience this paper takes a fresh look at the analysis of labour market dynamics and argues that capital accumulation plays a fundamental role in shaping unemployment movements this role has generally been examined by considering indirect transmission channels of the capital stock effects i e using variables like interest rates or investment ratios in the estimation of single equation unemployment rate models here we advocate a different approach we directly estimate the effects of capital stock in the labour market by applying the chain reaction theory of unemployment and we find that capital stock is a major determinant of unemployment in the nordic countries in particular the different unemployment experiences of these economies derive from the temporary albeit prolonged negative shocks to capital stock growth in denmark and sweden and the permanent downturn of capital stock growth in finland we are thus able to explain why the crisis of the early 1990s had a more acute impact in finland than in its twin economy sweden

on the incentives to increase input efficiency under monopoly trade unions we examine the effects of and the incentives for increasing input efficiency within a spatially segregated cournot duopoly with monopoly trade unions whose utility functions depend on both wages and employment we show that with neoclassical as well as leontief technology unions raise wages to appropriate fully the gains from labor saving technological or organisational improvements leaving the firm with no incentive to invest in increasing the efficiency of workers however capital saving technological improvement may be profitable depending on the elasticity of substitution finally we examine the implication of a fixed minimum wage or competitive labor market in one country

trade credit and the effect of macro financial shocks evidence from u s panel data using disaggregated panel data we examine how firms change trade credit in response to a monetary tightening we find that both accounts payable and accounts receivable increase with tighter monetary policy implying that trade credit helps firms absorb the effect of a credit contraction further both s p 500 firms and a comparison group of smaller firms increase net trade credit accounts receivable minus payable making up for the reduced liquidity associated with tighter policy however we find no evidence that large firms play this role more actively than smaller firms

how capital regulation and other factors drive the role of shadow banking in funding short term business credit abstract this paper empirically analyzes how capital regulation risk and other factors altered the relative use of shadow banking funded short term business debt since the early 1960s results indicate that the share was affected over the long run not only by changing information and reserve requirement costs but also by shifts in relative regulation of bank versus nonbank credit sources such as basel i in 1990 and reregulation in 2010 in the short run the shadow bank share rose when deposit interest rate ceilings were binding on traditional banks the economic outlook improved or risk premia declined and fell when event risks arose

the normalized ces production function theory and empirics abstract the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor and in turn the direction of technical change are critical parameters in many fields of economics until recently though the application of production functions with specifically non unitary substitution elasticities i e non cobb douglas was hampered by empirical and theoretical uncertainties as recently revealed normalization of production technology systems holds out the promise of resolving many of those uncertainties we survey and assess the intrinsic links between production as conceptualized in a production function factor substitution as made most explicit in constant elasticity of substitution functions and normalization defined by the fixing of baseline values for relevant variables first we recall how the normalized constant elasticity of substitution function came into existence and what normalization implies for its formal properties then we deal with the key role of normalization in recent advances in the theory of business cycles and of economic growth next we discuss the benefits normalization brings for empirical estimation and empirical growth research finally we identify promising areas of future research

getting the word out enforcement information dissemination and compliance behavior the question for the tax authority is how individuals become aware of enforcement effort to be an effective tool in reducing tax evasion taxpayers must be aware of the current audit and penalty regime we use laboratory experiments to examine the compliance impact of types of information dissemination regarding audit frequency and results the information includes official information disseminated by the tax authority and unofficial or informal communications among taxpayers our results indicate that the effect of the type of post audit information is conditional on whether the taxpayer is well informed of the audit rate prior to filing we find that the tax authority would be served by pre announcing audit rates credibly and by emphasizing the previous period audit frequency in annual reporting of enforcement effort

entrepreneurial moral hazard and bank monitoring a model of the credit channel abstract this paper develops a model of the choice between bank and market finance by entrepreneurial firms that differ in the value of their net worth the monitoring associated with bank finance ameliorates a moral hazard problem between the entrepreneurs and their lenders the model is used to analyze the different strands of the credit view of the transmission of monetary policy in particular we derive the empirical implications of a broad credit channel and compare them to those obtained when the model is extended to incorporate some elements of the bank lending channel

global influences on uk manufacturing prices 1970 2000 abstract we introduce the first consistent series of domestic product and related import price indices at the industry level for the uk using the data to analyse both domestic and international determinants of uk manufactured product prices foreign influences on uk prices in domestic markets are always present but domestic cost movements dominate we show that the pass through of world price tariff and exchange rate changes into product prices is partial in general and varies markedly between product categories standard tariff and exchange rate theories overstate price responses to global pricing determinants and fail to allow for variation between industrial sectors such theories can mislead when used for policy analysis and prediction

economic growth and the elasticity of substitution two theorems and some suggestions at the beginning of the twentieth century the work of the swedish economist knut wicksell 1901 marked an important advance in our understanding of the relationship between the structure of production functions and income distribution wicksell had asked the following question among many others suppose that the marginal productivities are equal to the remuneration rates of each factor what then should be the form of the corresponding production function he pointed out p 125 that the general integral of the partial differential equation implied by this relationship was of the form y lf kil which meant in turn that the product y was necessarily a homogeneous of degree one function of capital k and labor l as an example he gave a function where the shares of k and l in y were constant and wrote down the function which would be rediscovered decades later by charles w cobb and paul h douglas 1928 however it is only half a century later in robert m solow s nobel prize winning 1956 essay that implications between the structure of the production function and long run equilibrium or disequilibrium of the economy were drawn in his classic article a contribution to the theory of economic growth solow had considered three cases analytically other cases were also discussed geometrically using a phase diagram he had labeled the two first cases 1hlarrod domar and cobb douglas respectively and he referred to the third type of production function as offering a bit of variety it was y ak 2 l 2 2 a particular case of y akp lp 1p in those early days solow had not pointed out to the reader that his cases could have been numbered 0 1 and 2 following the elasticity of substitution of the corresponding production function it would be only five years later in 1961 that with his coauthors kenneth j arrow et al he would find the general form of the two factor constant elasticity of substitution ces production function by integrating the differential equation corresponding to the observed relationship between output per capita and the wage rate solow s third case was indeed highly interesting since it allowed the possibility of everincreasing income per head even without any technical progress indeed solow showed that due to the efficiency of the system entailed by the particular production function he had chosen there existed a threshold for the savings rates s to generate investment per head large enough for income per head to grow forever that threshold was s nla2 where n is the growth rate of the population it was then natural to ask whether one could express that threshold in terms of the elasticity of substitution a the value of that threshold was determined by de la grandville 1989 to be equal to s no3 or where a is k s coefficient in a normalized ces function equal to a in solow s third case where u 2 for any s and n values this relationship gives also the threshold value in implicit form by the solution of ao1 1 log 3q or ilog nls by totally differentiating the last relationship one could observe that the threshold for the elasticity of substitution to entail ever sustained growth was an in klump faculty of mathematics and economics university of ulm helmholtzstrasse 20 d 89081 ulm germany de la grandville department of economics university of geneva 102 boulevard carl vogt ch 1211 geneva 4 switzerland we gratefully acknowledge the comments of seminar participants at stanford university and at the universities of stuttgart hohenheim and munich where parts of the paper were presented also we would like to thank without implicating in any way robert solow for his insightful remarks and an anonymous referee for very helnfuil supgestions wicksell cobb and douglas would no doubt burst with pride if they knew that one of our first year students wrote in a paper of his of course we recognize here a kirk douglas production function

does unemployment hysteresis falsify the natural rate hypothesis a meta regression analysis abstract a quantitative survey of 24 studies containing 99 national estimates of unemployment persistence reinstates unemployment hysteresis as a viable falsifying hypothesis to the natural rate hypothesis empirical evidence to the contrary may be attributed to small sample misspecification and publication biases larger estimates of unemployment persistence are produced by models that use more information t 9 03 p 0 0001 and are better specified a theme of bias and misspecification among studies that are more supportive of natural rate hypothesis emerges in several independent ways the nonstationarity of the unemployment rate is confirmed both by the observed rate of convergence of persistence estimates across the empirical literature and by the point towards which they converge the natural rate hypothesis may be regarded as falsified should we choose to do so

monetary policy in the uk the authors argue that the institutional dimension of the bank of england monetary policy and the role the uk hm treasury assumes in this framework are both firmly based on the new consensus in macroeconomics ncm this is also the theoretical framework upon which the inflation targeting element of monetary policy is firmly based this paper discusses these aspects of uk monetary policy and then assesses the policy that has been pursued since 1997 with some reference made to the period between 1992 and 1997 when a version of the framework was introduced the strategy has been successful in terms of keeping uk inflation rates within the targets set by hm treasury however a number of problematic issues are highlighted and discussed

bank assets liquidity and credit cycles abstract we study how bank collateral assets and their pledgeability affect the amplitude of credit cycles to this end we develop a tractable model where bankers intermediate funds between savers and borrowers if bankers default savers acquire the right to liquidate bankers assets however due to the vertically integrated structure of our credit economy savers anticipate that liquidating financial assets i e loans is conditional on borrowers being solvent on their debt obligations this friction limits the collateralization of bankers financial assets beyond that of real assets i e capital in this context increasing the pledgeability of financial assets eases more credit and reduces the spread between the loan and the deposit rate thus attenuating capital misallocation as it typically emerges in credit economies a la kiyotaki and moore 1997 we uncover a close connection between the collateralization of bank loans macroeconomic amplification and the degree of procyclicality of bank leverage

information and bank credit allocation abstract private information obtained by lenders leads to borrower capture to the extent that such information cannot be communicated credibly to outsiders we analyze how this capture affects the loan portfolio allocation of informed lenders first we show that banks charge higher interest rates and finance relatively less creditworthy borrowers in market segments with greater information asymmetries second when faced with greater competition from outside lenders banks reallocate credit toward more captured borrowers flight to captivity third if borrower quality and captivity are sufficiently correlated an increase in the competitiveness of uninformed lenders can worsen the informed lender s overall loan portfolio the model explains observed consequences of financial liberalizations

aggregate demand conflict and capacity in the inflationary process this paper focuses on an alternative perspective on inflation to that of the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu it indicates that there are no automatic forces leading to a level of aggregate demand consistent with constant inflation inflationary pressures arise from conflict over income shares and from cost elements with the price of raw materials especially oil being the most important there are supply side factors impinging on the inflationary process which arise from the level of productive capacity relative to aggregate demand the supply side constraints are viewed as arising from capacity constraints rather than from the operation of the labour market copyright 2005 oxford university press

financial crisis and credit crunch in korea evidence from firm level data abstract this paper analyzes the credit crunch following the recent financial crisis in korea using enterprise level data we find that there were big differences in the magnitude of the credit contraction across different types of firms in particular chaebol conglomerate affiliated firms appeared to have lost the preferential access to credit that they had enjoyed in the pre crisis period and credit appears to have been reallocated in favor of more efficient firms this suggests that the credit crunch suffered by certain sectors can be attributed to the adjustment by banks and enterprises to the restructuring of the financial sector rather than tight monetary policy or an external credit constraint

general equilibrium macroeconomic models of unemployment can they explain the unemployment path in the oecd several theories which seek to explain the high and apparently persistent unemployment in the oecd countries over the past two decades have arisen within the framework of imperfections in the goods and labour markets probably the most prominent theories within this class of models are the general equilibrium models of phelps 1994 layard and nickell 1986 and layard et al 1991 labelled structuralist theories of unemployment by phelps 1994 common to the structuralist theories is that the low frequency movements in unemployment or the nairu are determined by structural variables such as unemployment benefits taxes real interest rates etc however the high frequency movements in unemployment are determined by wage and price surprises and in the layard and nickell 1986 model also by cyclical mark ups employment is entirely determined by the firms willingness to supply and the firms are never sales constrained by contrast the general equilibrium model of sarantis 1993 which is in post keynesian spirit suggests that unemployment on all frequencies is mainly an outcome of demand side factors in this model imperfections in the goods and labour markets are less important determinants of unemployment in this paper i estimate the extent to which the models of phelps 1994 layard and nickell 1986 henceforth l n and sarantis 1993 are able to explain the unemployment path of the oecd countries using annual data over the period 1960 to 1993 the theoretical set up of the models is presented in section 1 and the empirical estimates are set out in section 2

unemployment and the real exchange rate in latin america summary today unemployment rates in several latin american countries are similar or even higher than the highest unemployment rates among oecd economies open unemployment has become for the first time in the region s history a major dimension of the employment problem this paper examines the role of the real exchange rate rer in the recent unemployment performance of latin america it presents a model of the determinants of unemployment the channels through which the rer influences unemployment performance as well as the stylized facts and empirical results about this relationship giving special attention to the cases of argentina brazil chile and mexico 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

on the path dependence of tax compliance abstract this paper presents experimental evidence that tax compliance is path dependent for given values of the audit probability and the fine for tax evasion we compare the income declaration of subjects who faced a change in one of the two parameters to that of subjects who experienced no such parameter change we show that past tax enforcement regimes continue to have an impact on current income declarations this finding may be explained by reference dependent preferences and it has important policy implications for instance legal transplants cannot be expected to reliably yield similar behavior in countries with different legal histories

the impact of financialisation on the wage share a theoretical clarification and empirical test it is frequently asserted that financialisation has contributed to the decline in the wage share this paper provides a theoretical clarification and a systematic empirical investigation we identify four channels through which financialisation can affect the wage share 1 enhanced exit options of firms 2 rising price mark ups due to financial overhead costs for businesses 3 increased competition on capital markets and shareholder value orientation and 4 the role of household debt in increasing workers financial vulnerability and undermining their class consciousness the paper compiles a comprehensive set of empirical measures of financialisation and uses it to test these hypotheses with a panel regression of 14 oecd countries over the 1992 2014 period we find strong evidence for negative effects of financial liberalisation and financial payments of non financial corporations on the wage share that are in the same order of magnitude as the effects of globalisation

unemployment questions and some answers in more or less every country in the oecd unemployment was lower in the decades following the second world war than in any other period of comparable length either before or since for example in britain unemployment has exceeded 5 in every peacetime decade from 1850 onwards except for the 1950s and 1960s alternatively as we can see in table 1 p 779 average unemployment in the 1980s and 90s is higher generally much higher than in the 1960s in every country considered why this is so is one of the questions which underlies this paper a second question which is also illustrated in the unemployment numbers presented in table 1 p 779 concerns the causes of the enormous variation in unemployment rates across the oecd countries as we shall see these are difficult questions the first in particular is one for which we do not have a complete answer by this i do not mean that we do not have theories which are broadly consistent with these numbers in fact we have theories consistent with more or less any numbers what we lack is a satisfactory empirical explanation of the time series pattern of oecd unemployment in what follows we remain focused on these two questions first considering the theoretical background and then looking at some possible answers we finish with some speculative conjectures on the first question

the impact of public transfer expenditures on tax evasion an experimental approach abstract this paper outlines the methodology and results of an experiment undertaken to analyze primarily the impact of public sector transfer payments on tax evasion behaviour apart from the use of transfer payments further explanatory variables used were income expected auditing probability and perceived tax burden the influence of these variables on both the propensity to evade taxes and the extent of taxes evaded are investigated in an attempt to add more realism some innovative changes to the experimental approach were incorporated

on evaluation costs in strategic factor markets the implications for competition and organizational design this paper uses a formal model to study how evaluation costs affect competition for resources in strategic factor markets it finds that relative scarcity may not always benefit resource sellers rather when competition among resource investors passes a certain threshold intensity miscoordination among investors increases to the point that sellers expected profits decline this paper extends the model to consider how investors organize to overcome managerial agency in resource evaluation two organizational designs are considered a incentivization wherein a lower level manager is motivated by an incentive contract to evaluate resources for an investor and b supervision wherein evaluation is either handled directly or closely monitored by headquarters the model suggests that competition among investors will be associated with a greater use of supervision and that investors using supervision will tend to make lower offers this paper also finds that supervision will be more common when valuable resources are rare this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

capital formation and unemployment this paper criticizes the current enthusiasm for labour market policies as the main route to employment creation in oecd countries such policies are normally seen as a means of encouraging more employment on existing capital stock this approach is one sided and downplays the equally important task of increasing productive capacity with more investment in productive capacity conventional labour market policies for increasing employment would be more effective and some might be unnecessary the paper analyses the role of capital stock within the framework of a simple nairu model based on previous work by the author it also presents some empirical evidence copyright 1995 by oxford university press

business culture and tax evasion why corruption and the unofficial economy can persist abstract this paper shows that business and tax inspection culture can create multiple equilibria in bad equilibria high cheating and corruption increases in penalties or auditing can have perverse impacts and increase cheating the source of the multiple equilibria is the externalities created by business and tax inspection cultures as tax evasion and corruption become more common they become more acceptable and their cost is lowered a third externality that between firms and inspectors is the source of the perverse effect more cheating by firms is good for bribe taking inspectors and more bribe taking inspectors are good for cheating firms

heterogeneous borrowers liquidity and the search for credit abstract we develop a general equilibrium model of credit formation where borrowers and lenders must search for matches and where the composition of borrowers adjusts to satisfy equilibrium entry conditions when market liquidity dries up as a result of fundamental shocks to the system fewer borrowers will participate in the credit market with low quality borrowers suffering disproportionately because of a flight to quality however less liquid credit markets need not be associated with lower social output because the effect of higher average quality may outweigh that of reduced market participation depending crucially on the source of the liquidity shock

how do flexible labour markets really work the role of profitability in influencing unemployment this paper assesses the theoretical justifications available for policies of flexible labour markets flms in reducing the level of unemployment in developed economies it empirically assesses the oecd s rationalisation of policy linking profitability to investment and job creation in four country cases new capital investment is found to be significant for unemployment in all cases but it is not found to be a consequence of the mechanistic achievement of normal profits without an empirically supported mechanism for how flms reduce unemployment the policy is open to the accusation of being no more than a political tool for altering distribution without concern for the wider socio economic consequences copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

what do we know about investment under uncertainty recent theoretical developments relating to investment under uncertainty have highlighted the importance of irreversibility for the timing of investment expenditures and their expected returns this has subsequently stimulated a growing empirical literature which examines uncertainty and threshold effects on investment behaviour this paper presents a review of this literature a variety of methods have been used to investigate the empirical implication of irreversibility in investment the majority focusing on the relationship between investment flows and proxy measures of uncertainty a general conclusion is that increased uncertainty at both aggregate and disaggregate levels leads to lower investment rates this suggests that there is an irreversibility effect under which greater uncertainty raises the value of the call option to delay a commitment to investment this effect appears to dominate any positive impact on investment arising from the fact that greater uncertability under certain circumstances increases the marginal profitability of capital the methods used raise a number of issues which call into question the reliability of the findings and these are addressed in the paper however if such irreversibility effects are present then their omission from traditional investment models casts doubt on the efficacy of such specifications jel classification d81 d92 e22

trade credit for supply chain coordination abstract trade credit is a seller s short term loan to the buyer allowing the buyer to delay payment of an invoice it has been the largest source of working capital for a majority of business to business firms in the united states numerous theories have been proposed to explain trade credit mainly from finance perspectives it has also been an important issue in supply chain management surprisingly most literature in supply chain management has examined the retailer s stocking policies given a supplier s trade credit this paper attempts to shed light on trade credit from a supplier s perspective and presents it as a tool for supply chain coordination specifically we explicitly assume firms financial needs for inventory following a newsvendor framework we assume that the supplier grants trade credit and markdown allowance given the supplier s offer the retailer determines order quantity and the financing option for the inventory either trade credit or direct financing from a financial institution our result shows that the supplier s markdown allowance alone cannot fully coordinate the supply chain if the retailer employs direct financing positive financing costs call for trade credit in order to subsidize the retailer s costs of inventory financing using trade credit in addition to markdown allowance the supplier fully coordinates the retailer s decisions for the largest joint profit and extracts a greater portion of the maximized joint profit

excessive wages and the return on capital received wisdom suggests that excessive wages defined as the part of real wages that do not follow labour productivity developments are adversely associated with the return on capital this paper argues that excessive wages and profits are better thought of as responses to changes in the economic political and institutional environment and there is no a priori reason for a negative relationship between them we thus investigate whether there is a causal effect of excessive wages on capital return using aggregate panel data for 19 oecd countries for the period 1970 2000 we account for the endogeneity of excessive wages by exploiting variations in institutional and labour market characteristics our main finding is that excessive wages do not affect the return on capital this result remains robust to alternative empirical specifications and to alternative definitions of profitability and excessive wages and questions the standard advice by international economic organizations on wage moderation copyright the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

how do we know that real wages are too high it is common belief that the wages that we observe are above the level that would prevail in a competitive labour market and also it is common to believe that wage moderation should be encouraged as a way to keep unemployment down this paper considers whether we can have confidence in these beliefs it presents a number of models designed to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom first we show that in an efficiency wage model in which there is involuntary unemployment a binding minimum wage may increase employment we then present a general equilibrium matching model in which there is involuntary unemployment but wages are below market clearing levels and raising wages can reduce unemployment we then consider the empirical evidence on employment and wage determination to argue that it is just as consistent with this model as with models in which wages are at or above market clearing levels

audit state dependent taxpayer compliance theory and evidence from colombia we develop and analyze a dynamic model of individual taxpayer compliance choice that predicts audit state dependent taxpayer compliance by distinguishing between forward looking versus myopic versus naive behavior we then test experimentally the audit state dependent model by reporting the results from the first tax compliance experiment run in colombia we find that subjects compliance rates increase with greater enforcement we also find more novel results fine rates should be increased after an audit and nudging myopic individuals toward reporting a constant rather than a fluctuating proportion of income would benefit both the taxpayer and the tax authority jel h26 c91

the economics of taxpayer compliance there is now a great deal of evidence suggesting that tax evasion is fairly widespread throughout european and north american economies estimates of the so called black economy indicate that perhaps 10 per cent of economic activity in these countries has been driven underground in the attempt to evade payment of tax for a detailed survey see pyle 1989 chs 2 4

unemployment and the real wage the economic basis for contesting political ideologies using the keynesian theory of effective demand this paper demonstrates how particular models such as that of cooperative capitalism enunciated by the left keynesian social democrats the marxian model of profit squeeze emphasizing distributive conflict and even the conservative model relying on supply side stimulus fit in as particular variants of a more general theoretical scheme through a reconstruction of the familiar is schedule the argument is weaved around the theme of the relations between unemployment and real wage in the context of both a closed and an open economy to explain the common macroeconomic basis of contesting ideologies copyright 1990 by oxford university press

labour market institutions and the personal distribution of income in the oecd we examine what determines differences across countries and over time in the distribution of personal incomes in the oecd we first model the wage determination process and show that unemployment the labour share and the wage differential are all functions of labour market institutions next we show that in a model economy with only four types of agents capitalists skilled and unskilled workers and unemployed the gini coefficient of personal incomes can be expressed as a function of the above three variables labour market institutions hence affect income inequality though the sign of their impact is ambiguous stronger unions and or a more generous unemployment benefit tend to reduce inequality through reduced wage differentials a higher labour share and also higher unemployment we then use a panel of oecd countries for the period 1970 96 to examine these effects we find first that the labour share remains an important aspect of overall inequality patterns and second that stronger unions and a more generous unemployment benefit tend to reduce income inequality high capital labour ratios also emerge as a strong equalising factor which has in part offset the impact of increasing wage inequality on the us distribution of personal incomes

credit reallocation deleveraging and financial crises this paper studies how the process of reallocation of credit across firms behaves before and after financial crises applying the methodology typically used for measuring job reallocation we track credit reallocation across korean firms for over three decades 1980 2012 the credit boom preceding the 1997 crisis featured a slowdown of credit reallocation after the crisis and the associated reforms the creditless recovery deleveraging masked a dramatic intensification and increased procyclicality of credit reallocation the findings suggest that the intensification of reallocation was efficiency enhancing

a fiscal stimulus and jobless recovery we analyze the effects of a government spending expansion in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with mortensen pissarides labor market frictions deep habits in private and public consumption investment adjustment costs a constant elasticity of substitution ces production function and adjustments in employment at both intensive and extensive margins the combination of deep habits and ces technology is crucial the presence of deep habits magnifies the responses of macroeconomic variables to a fiscal stimulus while an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the range of available estimates allows the model to produce a scenario compatible with the observed jobless recovery

factor substitution and factor augmenting technical progress in the united states a normalized supply side system approach abstract using a normalized ces function with factor augmenting technical progress we estimate a supply side system of the u s economy from 1953 to 1998 avoiding potential estimation biases that

do labour supply and demand curves exist the objective of this paper is to show that circumstantial and empirical evidence for the existence of labour supply and demand curves is at best inconclusive and at worst casts doubt on their existence because virtually all orthodox models of labour markets simple and complex are built upon the foundation stones of labour supply and demand curves these models lack empirically supported foundations orthodox labour economists must therefore either provide stronger evidence or stop using labour supply and demand curves as the foundation stones of their models the conclusion discusses implications for future orthodox and heterodox labour economics

phillips curves and unemployment dynamics a critique and a holistic perspective the conventional wisdom that inflation and unemployment are unrelated in the long run implies that these phenomena can be analysed by separate branches of economics the macro literature tries to explain inflation dynamics and estimates the nairu the labour macro literature tries to explain unemployment dynamics and determine the real economic factors that drive the natural rate of unemployment we show that the orthodox view that the new keynesian phillips curve is vertical in the long run and that it cannot generate substantial inflation persistence relies on the implausible assumption of a zero interest rate in the light of these results we argue that a holistic framework is needed to jointly explain the evolution of inflation and unemployment

the money market meltdown of the great depression consistent with theories of financial frictions this study finds that higher corporate risk premia and flight to quality events contributed to the increased use of a collateralized form of business lending bankers acceptances in real levels and relative to that of noncollateralized commercial paper which plunged during the great depression these short lived instruments are more timely measures of credit availability than are bank business failures and bank loan outstandings these shifts in the composition of external finance were large supporting the view that financial frictions rose and credit availability fell during the great depression

capital accumulation labour market institutions and unemployment in the medium run according to the mainstream view labour market institutions lmis are the key determinants of unemployment in the medium run the actual empirical explanatory power of measures for labour market institutions however has recently been called into question the keynesian view holds periods of high real interest rates and insufficient capital accumulation responsible for unemployment empirical work in this tradition has paid little attention to the role of lmis this paper contributes to the debate by highlighting the role of autonomous changes in capital accumulation as a macroeconomic shock in the empirical analysis medium term unemployment is explained by capital accumulation lmis and a number of macroeconomic shocks in a panel analysis covering 20 oecd countries the economic effects of changes in lmi variations in capital accumulation and other macro shocks are compared capital accumulation and the real interest rate are found to have statistically significant effects that are robust to the inclusion of control variables and show larger effects than lmi

economics for the future many of us decided to study economics because we were interested in issues such aseconomic growth unemployment poverty discrimination and social exclusion andfor much of the history of the discipline economists grappled with explaining suchphenomena and hopefully helped to improve the development of economic policy but now the discipline is increasingly dominated by other concerns such asmathematical rigour and econometric modelling the new york times columnist michael weinstein recalled how his passion to learn economics which was driven bya desire to understand the causes of poverty and the impact of technical change wasimmediately quelled when on his rst day as a graduate student at the massachusettsinstitute of technology the professor announced that all of economics is a subset ofthe theory of separating hyperplans weinstein 2000 the subject has become soobscure that even orthodox economists are bemoaning its intellectual poverty accordingtomiltonfriedman economicshasbecomeincreasinglyanarcanebranchof mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems friedman 1999 p 137 and robert solow has observed today if you ask a mainstream economista question about almost any aspect of economic life the response will be suppose wemodel that situation and see what happens modern mainstream economics consistsof little else but examples of this process quoted in lawson 2005 so many economists are now increasingly engaged in research and teaching that isdisconnected from the issues that in uence people s lives as long 2005 observed academiceconomistsremainhiddenintheirivorytowers theyareneitherhouseholdnames nor a signi cant presence in newspaper commentary pages how strange fora country that produced the most famous economists of all time adam smith davidricardo and john maynard keynes but not all remain hidden in their ivory towers there are a few who do in uence the policy domain but they come from the intel lectually narrow sect of neoclassical economics and there are those from the neo classical sect who have managed to in ltrate popular culture by throwing away themaths packaging their prose in airport style books and entertaining their readerswithstories about why sumo wrestlers cheat and why drug pushers live with their mums see levitt and dubner 2005 as modern orthodox economics moves away from reality there is both theopportunity and the need for heterodox economics to orientate economics towards

a note on piketty s capital in the twenty first century thomas piketty s capital documents long term trends in income and wealth in advanced economies it also provides a theoretical framework for analysing the past and projecting the future piketty argues that the ratio of wealth to national income is on an upward trend and that this is responsible for the rising income share of wealth owners this note accepts piketty s main empirical findings but questions his interpretation the rising income share of wealth owners is not due to the over accumulation of capital as he claims but just the opposite there has been too little real investment the note also considers the long term dynamics of piketty s model and explores the effect of modifying his assumptions about savings behaviour finally it considers the implications of rising asset prices which are documented by piketty but are not adequately taken into account in his theoretical analysis or projection of future trends

a fairness approach to income tax evasion abstract the tax that a taxpayer wishes to evade is determined on the basis of his perception of the fairness of his fiscal treatment with respect to both governmental supply of public goods and the perceived behaviour of other taxpayers the coercive powers of the state and the taxpayer s attitude toward risk determine the extent to which this desired level is undertaken in practice this approach is able to produce implications for the relationship between public expenditure tax rates and tax evasion which are more consistent with empirical evidence than the results of the conventional portfolio choice approach

the changing structure of local credit markets are small businesses special abstract in many countries consolidation in the banking industry has reduced the number of small banks and led to significant shifts in market shares deregulation has fostered entry in local credit markets and the expansion of branch networks increasing competition in local markets small businesses are believed to be more vulnerable to these changes since they are more dependent on credit from local banks in this paper we investigate the consequences of consolidation and entry for these borrowers compared with those for large firms we employ a data set for italy which provides information on volumes of loans and bad loans by size of borrower with a detailed geographical partition we find that mergers are followed by a temporary reduction in outstanding credit to all sizes of borrowers and by an increase in bad loans most likely due to the reassessment of banks portfolios entry has a relatively persistent negative impact on credit supply to small and medium sized firms our results also show that concentration branch density and the share of branches of small banks affect the volumes of credit and bad loans of small borrowers