Unemployment in Europe: Swimming against the Tide of Skill-Biased Technical Progress without Relative Wage Adjustment

The hypothesis that European unemployment is the rigid relative wage mirror-image of increased wage dispersion in the US is explored. The framework is a two sector –manufacturing and services- model with skilled and unskilled labor. A proxy for skill-biased technical progress (SBTP) is constructed from data on total factor productivity (TFP). Econometric analysis of the relationship between SBTP and aggregate unemployment shows that SBTP explains some 50% of the unemployment increase in major European countries since the early 1970s, but it does not explain US unemployment. The hypothesis is robust in that it is not rendered void by inclusion of alternative, mostly macroeconomic, explanatory variables.TBA

The contribution of information and communication technologies to growth in Europe and the US: A macroeconomic analysis.

The assessment and monitoring of the effects of various tax reforms in Member States has become a key policy concern in the Community. In the Presidency Conclusions of the Lisbon European Council on 23-24 March 2000, the European Council requested the Council and the Commission to assess "the contribution of public finances to growth and employment, and assessing, on the basis of comparable data and indicators, whether adequate concrete measures are being taken in order to … alleviate the tax pressure on labour …". Such an evaluation needs an accurate, timely and comparable system of tax indicators enabling the Commission and the Council to quantify the early impact of tax reforms on the tax rates on labour, capital and consumption.  This paper presents a proposal for such a system, discusses its properties and compares it with other available sets of tax rates.fiscal policy, tax reforms, growth

The Magnitude and Timing of Retail Beef and Bread Price Response to Changes in Input Costs

In this study we develop a model for pass-through behavior for two retail food items with different levels of processing, beef and bread, using 36 years of monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics price indices data (1972-2008). Through the use of a two-stage error correction model that allows for the possibilities of asymmetric and threshold type response behavior, we analyze both the farm to wholesale and wholesale to retail price relationship considering underlying cointegrating relationships and allowing for the presence of structural breaks in these long term equations. Our results indicate that broad differences in price behavior exist not only between food categories but also across production level prices. While farm to wholesale relationships generally appear to be symmetric, retail prices are shown to have a somewhat more complicated response behavior, and for both food products the pass-through at this stage is weaker than that of the farm to wholesale response.Marketing,

Adjustment in EMU: A model-based analysis of country experiences

This paper uses a two-country-three-sector DSGE model to analyse adjustment in the Euro area. A particular distinction is made between tradeables and non tradeables and non tradeables are further disaggregated into housing and services. The experience of six countries which have shown strong divergences in the early years of the euro area, namely Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain is analysed. The framework allows replication of actual developments in euro-area Member States using a model that is inherently stable. It is found that to a large extent, the diverging growth and inflation developments and current account shifts can be attributed to one-off adjustment to EMU which broadly seems to have run its course. The absence of an exchange risk premium in EMU allows an increase in capital mobility resulting in a lower correlation between domestic savings and investment. Increased capital mobility seems to have been an important driving force behind the current account dynamics. Due to the absence of risk premia, investment - and especially housing investment - responds strongly to exogenous shocks.DSGE model, adjustment in the Euro area, exchange risk premium in EMU, capital mobility, risk premia, exogenous shocks, Langedijk, Roeger

QUEST II. A multi country business cycle and growth model. Economic Papers No. 123, October 1997. II/509/97-EN

From the Introduction. QUEST was designed to analyse the economies in the member states of the European Union and their interactions with the rest of the world, especially with the United States and Japan. The focus of the model is on the transmission of the effects of economic policy both on the domestic and the international economy. The model was primarily constructed to serve as a tool for policy simulation; less emphasis was put on its ability to serve as a forecasting tool. Given the wide coverage of the model it must necessarily be highly aggregated. A high degree of aggregation and foundation of the specification in current macroeconomic theory also helps in interpreting and understanding the results of the simulations. Finally simplicity also facilitates the solution of the model and reduces the time and memory requirements of the computer-simulations. The new model contains structural models for the EU member states, the US and Japan and distinguishes 10 additional countries/regions in trade feedback models in order to model trade interactions with the rest of the world

Produce Sourcing and Transportation Cost Effects on Wholesale Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Prices

Demand and Price Analysis,

The macroeconomic effects of a pandemic in Europe - A model-based assessment

This report estimates possible macroeconomic effects of a pandemic taking place in the EU in 2006, using a quarterly macroeconomic model. The macroeconomic costs of a pandemic, that is the cost in terms of production lost due to illness and death measured as reductions in GDP growth and/or declines in the level of GDP, are quantified in various pandemic scenarios. We focus on two sectors of the European economy that are expected to be particularly severely hit, tourism and trade. The results are compared with those obtained in similar studies. Our basic conclusion is that, although a pandemic would take a huge toll in human suffering, it would most likely not be a severe threat to the European macroeconomy.Pandemics, avian flu, Spanish influenza, macroeconomic model, Jonung, Roeger

QUEST II. A Multi-Country Business Cycle and Growth Model

QUEST was designed to analyse the economies in the Member States of the European Union and their interaction with the rest of the world. The paper presents a new version of the QUEST model which is now considerably modified with respect to its theoretical structure. It first presents a model description for the following sectors: household behaviour, firm behaviour and government. Then, it proposes the markets and prices equations. The second section contains standard simulations. It first considers monetary policy and fiscal policy shocks, then an example of a productivity shock.II/511/97-ENQUEST was designed to analyse the economies in the member states of the European Union and their interactions with the rest of the world, especially with the United States and Japan. The focus of the model is on the transmission of the effects of economic policy both on the domestic and the international economy. The model was primarily constructed to serve as a tool for policy simulation; less emphasis was put on its ability to serve as a forecasting tool. Given the wide coverage of the model it must necessarily be highly aggregated. A high degree of aggregation and foundation of the specification in current macroeconomic theory also helps in interpreting and understanding the results of the simulations. Finally simplicity also facilitates the solution of the model and reduces the time and memory requirements of the computer-simulations. The new model contains structural models for the EU member states, the US and Japan and distinguishes 10 additional countries/regions in trade feedback models in order to model trade interactions with the rest of the world.Compared to the former version of the QUEST model, which was presented in European Economy No. 47 (1991), the new model is now considerably modified with respect to its theoretical structure. The previous version of QUEST was deeply rooted in the Keynesian tradition of econometric model building, strongly stressing the demand side of the economy and modelling consumer and investment behaviour in a backward looking fashion. In the new version an attempt was made to base the behavioural equations more strongly on principles of dynamic optimisation of private households and firms. That makes the model substantially more forward looking. Also the supply side is now more explicitly modelled. The present model is also closed with respect to stock-flow interactions. Those stock variables which can be identified on a macroeconomic level such as physical capital, net foreign assets, money and government debt are endogenously determined and wealth effects are allowed to influence savings, production and investment decisions of private households, firms and the government. Moreover, financial linkages between national economies are now more explicitly modelled. In the current version it is assumed that assets determined in different currencies are perfect substitutes - up to an exogenous risk premium. Consistent modelling of international trade and financial linkages also require that at each instant two adding-up constraints hold: trade balances and net foreign asset positions sum to zero. Also the long run properties of the model are now systematically explored.Apart from simulations related to the Commission's short and medium term projections, the model has been intensively used to analyse the impact of the Maastricht criteria on growth and employment and the long run effects of fiscal consolidation and structural reforms in Europe (e.g. Bayar et al., 1997a). Related to this, the model was used to study the impact of monetary policy on the success of government expenditure cuts (Roeger and in 't Veld, 1997a), and the macroeconomic effects of various tax reforms (Roeger and in 't Veld, 1997b) and VAT harmonisation (Bayar, Roeger and in 't Veld, 1997). The model has also been used to assess the employment and growth effects of the Trans European Transport Networks (European Commission, 1996), while the models for Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have been used to look at the macroeconomic effects of the Structural Funds (Roeger, 1996b).quest, economic cycle, modelling

How much has labour taxation contributed to European structural unemployment?

This paper analyses the effect of labour taxes on Euro area unemployment. Empirical estimates obtained so far can be criticised as being spurious because the regressions generally lack non-measurable variables constituting the reservation wage that can possibly be non stationary. Here we overcome this problem by using an unobserved component model. For the Euro area unemployment, we find a significant tax effect that is in the middle of the estimates that can be found in the empirical literature. This study gives support to the view that lowering labour taxes can help to reduce unemployment in continental Europe.NAIRU, Unobserved components, Kalman filter

Estimation of real equilibrium exchange rates.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a consistent and transparent theoretical and empirical framework to analyse real effective equilibrium exchange rates for a large number of industrial countries. The theoretical and empirical model, as well as the applied methodology, are closely related to a recently published working paper by the IMF (Alberola et.al (1999)).In the theoretical part, a macroeconomic model of internal and external equilibrium is presented (chapters 2, 3 and 4). The empirical part estimates a simplified version of the theoretical model and results are thereafter reported and evaluated on a country by country basis (chapter 5). The purpose of the empirical part is not to arrive at point estimates for equilibrium exchange rates, but rather to provide some basic econometric evidence as a complement and illustration of the theoretical analysis. The empirical model and statistical methodology is kept simple and uniform for all countries in order to facilitate interpretation and evaluation of the results.exchange rates, modelling