We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms' job offer and workers' job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show that...

This paper seeks to extend the domain of identity economics by exploring motivational foundations of in-group cooperation and out-group competition. On this basis, we explore the reflexive interaction between individual economic decisions and social identities in response to technological change...

A major criticism against staggered nominal contracts is that they give rise to the so called persistency puzzle - although they generate price inertia, they cannot account for the stylised fact of inflation persistence. It is thus commonly asserted that, in the context of the new Phillips curve...

The Friedman rule states that steady-state welfare is maximized when there is deflation at the real rate of interest. Recent work by Khan et al (2003) uses a richer model but still finds deflation optimal. In an otherwise standard new Keynesian model we show that, if households have hyperbolic...

We incorporate inequity aversion into an otherwise standard New Keynesian dynamic equilibrium model with Calvo wage contracts and positive inflation. Workers with relatively low incomes experience envy, whereas those with relatively high incomes experience guilt. The former seek to raise their...

This paper provides a model of "social hysteresis" whereby long, deep recessions demotivate workers and thereby lead them to change their work ethic. In switching from a pro-work to an anti-work identity, their incentives to seek and retain work fall and consequently their employment chances...

This paper explores the influence of wage and price staggering on monetary persistence. We show that, for plausible parameter values, wage and price staggering are complementary in generating monetary persistence. We do so by proposing the new measure of quantitative inertia, after discussing...