How would people spend time if confronted by permanent declines in market work? We identify preferences off exogenous cuts in legislated standard hours that raised employers' overtime costs in Japan around 1990 and Korea in the early 2000s. Using time-diaries from before and after these shocks,...

Die Arbeitskosten eines Landes dienen oft als Erklärung für seine Wettbewerbsstärke, die Standortattraktivität und die Arbeitsmarktlage. Daher stoßen internationale Arbeitskostenvergleiche auf großes öffentliches Interesse. Es existiert jedoch keine eindeutige Definition des Begriffs...

Recent theoretical research has studied extensively the link between wage setting and monetary policymaking in unionized economies. This paper addresses the question of the role of monetary uncertainty from both an empirical and theoretical point of view. Our analysis is based on a simple model...

We test for mean reversion in real exchange rates using a recently developed unit root test for non-normal processes based on quantile autoregression inference in semi-parametric and non-parametric settings. The quantile regression approach allows us to directly capture the impact of different...

We use tests for multiple breaks at unknown points in the sample, and the Stock-Watson (1996, 1998) time-varying parameters median-unbiased estimation methodology, to investigate changes in the equilibrium rate of growth of labor productivity–both per hour and per worker–in the United...

This paper is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire banking market...

Over the last two centuries, the cross-spectral coherence between either narrow or broad money growth and inflation at the frequency ω=0 has exhibited little variation–being, most of the time, close to one–in the U.S., the U.K., and several other countries, thus implying that the fraction...

We explore the macroeconomic impact of a compression in the long-term bond yield spread within the context of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 via a Bayesian time-varying parameter structural VAR. We identify a ‘pure’ spread shock which, leaving the short-term rate unchanged by construction,...

Central bank independence is a common feature in advanced economies. Delegation of monetary policy to an independent central bank with a clear mandate for price stability has proven to be successful in keeping a check on inflation and providing a trusted currency. However, it is also a fact that...

The paper provides an overview of the financial history of the chemical industry since its inception in the latter half of the nineteenth century in four major countries: Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States. The chemical industry is particularly intriguing from the point of view of...