We develop a general equilibrium analysis of the impact of active labour market policy on unemployment, wages and the welfare of the employed. This framework is used to assess the political support in favour of such policies and to relate it to the working of such policies and other parameters...

It is often argued that a mandatory minimum wage is binding only if the wage density displays a spike at it. In this Paper we analyse a model with search frictions and heterogeneous production technologies, in which imposition of a minimum wage affects wages even though, after imposition, the...

Short-time work was the 'German answer' to the economic crisis. The number of short-time workers strongly increased in the recession and peaked at more than 1.5 million. Without the extensive use of short-time work, unemployment would have risen by approximately twice as much as it actually did....

This Paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...

This paper constructs a theoretical model to study the effects on employment of the introduction of flexible labour contracts (i.e. with low firing costs), which occurred in many European countries in the 1980s, which it then tests on Spanish data. The model predicts that such contracts increase...

This paper shows how particle filtering allows us to undertake likelihood-based inference in dynamic macroeconomic models. The models can be nonlinear and/or non-normal. We describe how to use the output from the particle filter to estimate the structural parameters of the model, those...

This paper models fluctuations in regional disaggregates as a non-stationary, dynamically evolving distribution. Doing so enables the study of the dynamics of aggregate fluctuations jointly with those of the rich cross-section of regional disaggregates. For the United States, the leading state...

Stochastic simulations are used on the Liverpool Model of the UK to assess the effect of macroeconomic stability of the UK adopting the Euro. Instability increases substantially, particularly for inflation and real interest rates. A key factor is the extent of the Euro's instability against the...

In this Paper we compare alternative approaches for dating the euro area business cycle and analysing its characteristics. First, we extend a commonly used dating procedure to allow for length, size and amplitude restrictions, and to compute the probability of a phase change. Second, we apply...