Does monetary union reduce employment?

We use a two-country monetary model with unionized labor markets and open-economy spillovers to study the macroeconomic consequences of the formation of a monetary union. It is shown that the monetary regime affects the trade-off between real consumer wages and employment faced by the unions. Consequently, the equilibrium employment is endogenous and depends on the monetary regime. In particular, a switch from a floating exchange rate regime to a monetary union improves employment, provided that the degree of central bank conservatism is sufficiently high, whereas with low degrees of conservatism employment falls. Inflation is higher in a monetary union with all finite degrees of central bank conservatism. In addition, we consider an asymmetric fixed exchange rate regime as an alternative starting position for a monetary union. All results are derived assuming that labor unions are only interested in employment and real wages (not directly inflation) and that all structural parameters of the model remain unchanged when a monetary union is established.monetary union; employment; labour unions; open-economy spillovers; central bank conservatism

On string topology of classifying spaces

Let G be a compact Lie group. By work of Chataur and Menichi, the homology of the space of free loops in the classifying space of G is known to be the value on the circle in a homological conformal field theory. This means in particular that it admits operations parameterized by homology classes of classifying spaces of diffeomorphism groups of surfaces. Here we present a radical extension of this result, giving a new construction in which diffeomorphisms are replaced with homotopy equivalences, and surfaces with boundary are replaced with arbitrary spaces homotopy equivalent to finite graphs. The result is a novel kind of field theory which is related to both the diffeomorphism groups of surfaces and the automorphism groups of free groups with boundaries. Our work shows that the algebraic structures in string topology of classifying spaces can be brought into line with, and in fact far exceed, those available in string topology of manifolds. For simplicity, we restrict to the characteristic 2 case. The generalization to arbitrary characteristic will be addressed in a subsequent paper.Comment: 93 pages; v4: minor changes; to appear in Advances in Mathematic

Labour market flexibility and policy coordination in a monetary union

Sufficiently flexible labour markets are considered an important precondition for countries to benefit from membership in the monetary union. Economic policy coordination within the European Community is extensive and includes issues related to labour market structures. In this paper we study the determination of flexibility of the labour market and, ultimately, of wages in a member country of the monetary union. As a starting point, the analysis assumes that each country’s government, in formulating its labour market policy, decides the degree of nominal wage flexibility in light of the fact that this involves political costs that increase with the degree of wage flexibility. The study then focuses on the effects of monetary union membership on each country’s prospects for coordination of economic policies – specifically labour market policies. The study shows that coordination of labour market policies contributes to greater nominal wage flexibility in member countries. However, coordination of labour market policies will be effective only if unemployment is persistent or under discretionary monetary policy. From the perspective of macroeconomic stability, there is no particular need for coordinating labour market policies among member countries if the common central bank can credibly precommit to a low inflation target or if fluctuations in unemployment are white noise.wage flexibility, economic policy coordination, credibility, precommitment

Waste and labor productivity in production planning case Finnish construction industry

The main objective of this paper is to examine labor productivity and waste and their role in production planning and control in Finnish construction industry. Three hypothesis are tested: (1) the assumption that labor productivity concerning different construction work disciplines has developed very little in the last 30 years; (2) the amount of waste has stayed on a constant high level on sites in the Finnish construction industry; and (3) labor productivity does not develop because the initial information included in the production plans includes also waste as an accepted phenomenon. A trend analysis of construction labor productivity is conducted over the period 1975-2008. Labor productivity and waste are examined through data from sites and Ratu-research (Finnish Construction Production Data on work methods and work rates). The results are examined along with prior international research findings on construction labor productivity, waste and production planning processes. Although the data and sites, as well as the Ratu-research material, are Finnish, the results are internationally applicable and can be utilized and connected to modern ways of working anywhere. Evaluation and considerations made in this paper are followed by further work

Introducing last planner : Finnish experiences

The Last Planner method1 represents a radically different manner of controlling production in construction. Even if its benefits are widely observed, it is also a common observation that the introduction of the Last Planner method to a site, into a company or into a country is not an easy and uncomplicated task. This paper reports on the experiences and lessons gained during the introduction of the Last Planner to Finland. A simplified explanation of Last Planner is presented. The experiences and lessons gained are contrasted with those presented in prior literature

Recognition of Harmonic Sounds in Polyphonic Audio using a Missing Feature Approach: Extended Report

A method based on local spectral features and missing feature techniques is proposed for the recognition of harmonic sounds in mixture signals. A mask estimation algorithm is proposed for identifying spectral regions that contain reliable information for each sound source and then bounded marginalization is employed to treat the feature vector elements that are determined as unreliable. The proposed method is tested on musical instrument sounds due to the extensive availability of data but it can be applied on other sounds (i.e. animal sounds, environmental sounds), whenever these are harmonic. In simulations the proposed method clearly outperformed a baseline method for mixture signals