Greater labour market flexibility is often advocated as the solution to joblessness. Calls to weaken minimum wage provisions, to make out-of-work benefits less generous and to reduce legislative or bargained restrictions on hiring and firing have the common objective of encouraging those without...

The paper develops an efficiency-wage model where input prices affect the equlibrium rate of unemployment. We show that a simple framework based on only two prices (the real price of oil and the real rate of interest) is able to explain the main post-war movements in the rate of U.S. joblessnss....

Much of the dramatic change in skill and wage structure observed in recent years in the United States is believed to stem from the impact of new technology. This paper compares the changing skill strcuture of wage bills and employment in the United States with six other advanced developed...

In partial equilibrium a rapidly rising carbon tax encourages oil producers to extract fossil fuels more quickly, giving rise to the Green Paradox. General equilibrium analysis for a closed economy shows that a rapidly rising carbon tax negatively affects the interest rate, which tends to weaken...

The principles of how best to manage the various components of national wealth are outlined, where the permanent income hypothesis, the Hotelling rule and the Hartwick rule play a prominent role. As far as managing natural resource wealth is concerned, a case is made to use an intergenerational...

Many oil exporters accumulate large sovereign wealth funds, though their portfolio allocation does not take into account below-ground assets, like oil. Similarly, the above-ground portfolio does not affect the decision to extract oil. This paper shows that subsoil oil wealth should change a...

This chapter describes the issues confronting any realistic context for economic forecasting, which is inevitably based on unknowingly mis-specified models, usually estimated from mis-measured data, facing intermittent and often unanticipated location shifts.  We focus on mitigating the...