Australia has experienced a varied track record on unemployment. For the third quarter of the 20th century unemployment averaged 2.0 per cent. This is bracketed by average unemployment rates of 8.6 and 7.4 per cent in the second and fourth quarter centuries. Explanations of this phenomenon vary....

Traditional theoretical literature which neglects the benefits of stabilization policies (e.g., Lucas 1987 and 2003) ultimately relies on the small impact that macroeconomic volatility has on aggregate income and consumption. In this article, we argue that such an approach is both theoretically...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

This paper is aimed to empirically test for Ireland the “granular hypothesis” (Gabaix 2011), which posits that firm-level productivity shocks can explain a sizable portion of aggregate productivity fluctuations. The Irish case is particularly relevant as Ireland has been experiencing...

This paper analyzes the effect of EPL on the conversion rate of temporary contracts into permanent ones in the same firm. Once EPL is enforced, two effects might arise: employers could tend to replace their permanent workforce with short-term employment because of the lower expected value of a...

In this paper we point out that the theoretical predictions concern-ing Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) are not fully confirmed by empirical evidence in Italy, a strict EPL country in the nine-ties, according to OECD indexes. In particular, worker and job flow rates are remarkably high,...

This paper looks at some of the fundamental ideas in contemporary economics such as the basic economic problem, opportunity cost and allocation a person is expected to encounter when they are first introduced to economic theory. It attempts to explain how the manner in which these concepts are...

The aim of this paper is to clarify and discuss the various ways firms can make workforce reductions. This aim is accomplished by an in-depth study of an historical case; the downsizing process undertaken in the 1920s by the Swedish Tobacco Monopoly, a state-owned company that had to balance...

This paper presents the first joint evaluation of the two major labour market reforms implemented in Spain to foster permanent employment in 1994 and 1997. The 1994 reform restored the principle of causality in the application of temporary contracts and the 1997 reform introduced a new permanent...

Does dismissal law create a "judicial risk" to which french firms are exposed? The paper discusses the different arguments (Blanchard and Tirole (2003), Cahuc and Kramarz (2004), Munoz-Perez and Serverin (2005)) using the empirical available evidence together with basic tools in economics of...