A growing body of new research has emphasized the macroeconomic consequences of transactional impediments in factor markets, and their role in the recurrent restructuring requirements of modern economies. We first review the function institutional arrangements play in facilitating transactions...

This paper presents a general equilibrium approach to calculating labour adjustment costs induced by trade policy changes or external sector shocks, which we illustrate by analyzing the adjustment consequences of eliminating quotas and tariffs on U.S. imports. In our approach, factor adjustments...

Like most Western European countries, Germany stringently regulates dismissals and layoffs. Critics contend that this regulation raises the costs of employment adjustment and hence impedes employers' ability to respond to fluctuations in demand. Other German labor policies, however, most...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a typology of different labor market configurations and investigate how two major structural adjustment policies, namely a trade liberalization reform and the relaxation of capital controls, affect the level of aggregate employment and the rate of...

This study examines the nature of the costs that firms face in adjusting labor demand in response to shocks induced by changes in output demand and prices. Empirical work on monthly plant-level time-series data shows that adjustment proceeds in jumps. Employment is unchanged in response to small...

The implications of downward nominal and ex ante real wage rigidity,and of wage contracting for the dispersion of relative wage changes in the presence of price inflation are examined. Rigidity implies that unexpected inflation will raise the variability of relative wage changes; contracting...

In this paper, we present a dynamic model which explains output, enployment and energy consumption in the French manufacturing sector in terms of the expectedand actual path of wage rates and energy prices in units of output. The modelhas two distinguishing features: First, the rate of capacity...

This paper investigates whether or not the adoption of the Euro has facilitated the introduction of structural reforms, defined as deregulation in the product markets and liberalization and deregulation in the labor markets. After reviewing the theoretical arguments that may link the adoption of...

We use a forty-two country model of production and trade to assess the implications of eliminating current account imbalances for relative wages, relative GDP's, real wages, and real absorption. How much relative GDP's need to change depends on flexibility of two forms: factor mobility and the...

Gross stocks of foreign assets have increased rapidly relative to national outputs since 1990, and the short-run capital gains and losses on those assets can amount to significant fractions of GDP. These fluctuations in asset values render the national income and product account measure of the...