Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

Bivariate duration data frequently arise in economics, biostatistics and other areas. In "bivariate frailty models", dependence between the frailties (i.e., unobserved determinants) induces dependence between the durations. Using notions of quadrant dependence, we study restrictions that this...

This paper describes a moments estimator for a standard state-space model with coefficients generated by a random walk. A penalized least squares estimation is linked to the GLS (Aitken) estimates of the corresponding linear model with time-invariant parameters. The VC estimates are moments...

This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations onunemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricterenforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higherunemployment, less income...

In the 1990s, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Brazil passeddual citizenship laws granting their expatriates the right to naturalize in the receiving countrywithout losing their nationality of origin...

We analyze optimal taxation in an economy with monopsonistic labor markets. Theindividuals, whose only decisions are whether to work, or not, have heterogeneousproductivities and opportunity costs of work. Given its preferences for redistribution, thegovernment, which does not observe the...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the individualearnings capacity is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital.Estimating these effects is complicated because earnings are observed for employedindividuals only, and employment is...

The economic impact of the 2007-2009 increases in the federal minimum wage (MW) isanalyzed using a sample of quick-service restaurants in Georgia and Alabama. Store-levelbiweekly payroll records for individual employees are used, allowing us to precisely measurethe MW compliance cost for each...

Although lower income is associated with overweight (and obesity), such an association is explained by a number of other confounding effects such as omitted variables (e.g., time preferences) explaining that income effect on overweight. We study the effect of unearned income shocks resulting...