Suchergebnisse

We analyze a model in which a government uses a second best policy to affect the reallocation of labor, following a change in relative prices. We consider two extreme cases, in which the government has either unlimited or negligible ability to commit to future actions. We explain why the ability to make commitments may be unimportant, and we illustrate this conjecture with numerical examples. For either assumption about commitment ability, the equilibrium policy involves gradual liberalization. The dying sector is protected during the transition to a free market, in order to decrease the amount of unemployment. Our results are sensitive to the assumptions about migration.

Examines the effects of a monetary expansion on certain key
macroeconomic variables, in particular the nominal exchange rate,
competitiveness, and domestic output and employment, using a modified
version of the Dornbusch (Journal of Political Economy, 1976)
model. Dornbusch′s original analysis of the implications of sticky
prices was conducted on the basis of two alternative assumptions
concerning the supply side of the economy, a fixed (full‐employment)
level of output and (in his Appendix) continuous goods market clearing,
maintained by instantaneous output adjustment. Neither of these
assumptions appears particularly satisfactory and the model presented
here attempts to address the issue by assuming output to be
instantaneously fixed, but to respond gradually to excess demand or
supply in the goods market. The structure of the resulting model is such
as to imply a third‐order dynamic adjustment process which is solved
explicitly. Two principal conclusions follow from the analysis. First,
despite the fact that the monetary expansion inevitably reduces the
domestic interest rate, nominal exchange rate overshooting need not
result. Second, the dynamics of adjustment are considerably more
complicated than in the original Dornbusch model and may, in fact, be
cyclical in nature.

This article provides a comparative analysis of fertility and family transformations and policy responses in Austria and the Czech Republic, two neighbouring countries in Central Europe that were until 1989 separated by the "Iron Curtain" that divided two competing political blocs in Europe. Such comparison is partly stimulated by the geographic proximity, shared history and culture of these two countries in the past and their gradual economic and social convergence in the last quarter of century. During this period both societies also grew surprisingly similar in their fertility and family patterns and main family policy trends. Fertility in both countries is relatively low, but not extremely low when compared with the countries of Southern Europe or East Asia, with the period total fertility rate recently converging to 1.45 and cohort fertility rates of the women born in the mid-1970s projected at 1.65 (Austria) and 1.8 children per woman (Czech Republic). Austrian fertility rates have been remarkably stable since the 1980s, while in the Czech Republic fertility had imploded during the 1990s, following the political regime change, before it started recovering in the 2000s. In both countries childbearing has rapidly shifted to later ages and increasingly has taken place outside marriage, with over a half of first births now born to cohabiting couples and single mothers. Czech women retain considerably lower childlessness, possibly due to the persistently strong normative support to parenthood in the country. Family policies, relatively generous in terms of government expenditures, were until recently dominated by a view that mothers should stay at home for an extended period with their children, making the return to employment difficult for women. However, recent policy adjustments in both countries have expanded the range of options available to parents, making the parental leave more flexible and, in the case of Austria, gradually expanding public childcare and supporting a stronger involvement of men in childrearing.

"This paper compares the P-bar model of price adjustment with the currently dominant Calvo specification. Theoretically, the P-bar model is more attractive as it depends upon adjustment costs for physical quantities rather than nominal prices, while incorporating a one-period information lag. Furthermore, the resulting adjustment relation is more completely free of "money illusion," in terms of dynamic relationships, and therefore satisfies the natural rate hypothesis of Lucas (1972), which is not satisfied by the Calvo model in any of its variants. Along the way, it shows that both the P-bar and Calvo models can be formulated in distinct versions in which current real wages are, or are not, allocative. Quantitatively, for a given calibration of the demand parameters, the implied time series properties of the inflation rate, output gap, and nominal interest rate are determined for various policy parameters, and are compared with quarterly data for the U.S. economy. Neither model dominates but, overall, the comparison seems somewhat more favorable to the P-bar model and certainly does not provide support for the dominant position held by the Calvo model in current monetary policy analysis"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site