Suchergebnisse

This paper demonstrates that intermediate goods should not be taxed even in the presence of dividend payments to households. We also find that optimal government policy in a second best world may include stockpiles of output—private supply exceeds private demand, and the government purchases the surplus. This may provide a possible explanation for some agricultural policies.

As one alternative to search frictions, wage stickiness is introduced in a New-Keynesian model to generate endogenous unemployment fluctuations due to mismatches between labor supply and labor demand. The effects on an estimated New-Keynesian model for the U.S. economy are: i) the Calvo-type probability on wage stickiness rises, ii) the labor supply elasticity falls, iii) the implied second-moment statistics of the unemployment rate provide a reasonable match with those observed in the data, and iv) wage-push shocks, demand shifts and monetary policy shocks are the three major determinants of unemployment fluctuations. ; The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from the Spanish government (research projects ECO2008-02641, ECO2009-11151 and SEJ2007-66592-C03-01/ECON from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, respectively). The first author also thanks Fundación Ramón Areces (VII Concurso Investigación en Economía) for financial support.

AbstractThis article considers the Australian evidence on whether there has been an excess supply of law graduates. There is evidence of a strong growth in demand for legal services over the past 15 years. It is also shown that the number graduating from Australian universities with a law degree grew by 3.5‐fold between 1989 and 2007. Evidence on employment rates and starting salaries for law graduates does not suggest that the labour market has been unable to absorb this increase in supply. There is, however, some evidence from the 2006 Census of a decline in the median salary of law graduates.

"We examine empirically how the maturity structure of government debt affects bond yields and excess returns. Our analysis is based on a theoretical model of preferred habitat in which clienteles with strong preferences for specific maturities trade with arbitrageurs. Consistent with the model, we find that (i) the supply of long- relative to short-term bonds is positively related to the term spread, (ii) supply predicts positively long-term bonds' excess returns even after controlling for the term spread and the Cochrane-Piazzesi factor, (iii) the effects of supply are stronger for longer maturities, and (iv) following periods when arbitrageurs have lost money, both supply and the term spread are stronger predictors of excess returns"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site