One of the most important consequences of the transition in Central and Eastern Europe has been the dismantling of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). It is argued in this paper that the abrupt loss of trading partners for the former CMEA countries and the Newly Independent States...

In contrast to much recent work regarding the causes of European unemployment, in this paper, we emphasise the importance of capital accumulation. But unlike the few previous studies which have examined the relationship between capital accumulation and unemployment, we argue that what matters...

Using an intertemporal model of saving and capital accumulation we demonstrate that it is impossible for any binding minimum wage to increase the after-tax incomes of workers if the production function is Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale, or if there are no differences in ability...

This paper analyzes long run outcomes resulting from adopting a binding minimum wage in a neoclassical model with perfectly competitive labour markets and capital accumulation. The model distinguishes between workers of heterogeneous ability and capitalists who do all the saving, and it entails...