We analyze a strategic game where in a first step, a country can adopt another country's currency. In a second step, thee two countries commit resources to economic integration. A common currency reduces the overall resource costs of economic integration, but imposes an idiosyncratic adjustment...

The massive increase in unemployment throughout the OECD since the early 1970s has led governments in many countries to introduce, or to expand, labour market policies such as training schemes, employment subsidies, public works or schemes of counselling or assistance in job search. Such...

This paper uses matched employer-employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) to estimate influences on managerial and employee perceptions of the employee relations climate. Both the strength and direction of union effects differ according to the nature of the union...

In the mid-1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then their labor markets have become more dynamic. This paper studies the implications of such reforms for the duration distribution of unemployment, with particular emphasis on the changes in the duration...

It has been argued that employee owned firms are not a viable organizational form; either they will fail as commercial undertaking or degenerate into capitalist firms as the proportion of hired workers increases. In this paper, we assemble 'stylized facts' on, and investigate empirically diverse...

This paper contains a selective review of some of the key fiscal issues faced by transition economies. The twelve countries that provide the empirical background for this study have all been under Fund programs for at least some of the time since they initiated their transitions from plan to...

This paper analyses the effect of a non-linear tax system on wage bargaining. The main conclusions are: an increase in the marginal income or payroll tax reduces the pre-tax wage; in the iso-elastic case, an increase in the average tax rate increases the pre-tax wage by more than the tax...

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project which investigated the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of the industrial relations and the processes by which this came about. Interviews were carried out with...

The main macroeconomic cost of a European Monetary Union could result from the loss of nominal exchange rate flexibility as an instrument for real exchange rate adjustments between regions exposed to asymmetric goods-market (IS) shocks. However, if asset-market (LM) shifts drive macroeconomic...

There is a growing consensus among economists that extending shop opening hours createsjobs. While this is probably true in deregulating industries, this paper argues there are somedeficiencies in the existing hypotheses about how exactly deregulation affects employment.First, this paper...