Milwaukee County-Funded Parks and Cultural Institutions

The Public Policy Forum's role in the Audit of Greater Milwaukee's Regional Cultural Assets was to examine the fiscal condition of those cultural assets owned and/or funded by Milwaukee County: the Milwaukee Public Museum, Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, Milwaukee County Historical Society, Charles Allis Museum, Villa Terrace Decorative Art Museum, Milwaukee County Cultural Artistic and Musical Programming Advisory Council, Milwaukee County Zoo and Milwaukee County Parks

Public jobs creation and unemployment dynamics

This paper raises the question of the dynamic effects of public spending in jobs on labor market performance. We use a dynamic matching model and study how public jobs creation affects endogenous workers' decisions to move on the labor market and private-sector firms' job creation and destruction decisions. We obtain that it exerts an attracting effect and a fiscal effect on the labor market that make the unemployment rate and job flows overshoot. As an empirical illustration, we estimate a SVAR model that focuses on the consequences of public job creations on unemployment, wages and job flows dynamics. We confirm our intuition : public employment has a significant ambiguous effect on private wages.Public sector labor market, unemployment dynamics.

Information-Sharing and Privacy in Social Networks

We present a new model for reasoning about the way information is shared among friends in a social network, and the resulting ways in which it spreads. Our model formalizes the intuition that revealing personal information in social settings involves a trade-off between the benefits of sharing information with friends, and the risks that additional gossiping will propagate it to people with whom one is not on friendly terms. We study the behavior of rational agents in such a situation, and we characterize the existence and computability of stable information-sharing networks, in which agents do not have an incentive to change the partners with whom they share information. We analyze the implications of these stable networks for social welfare, and the resulting fragmentation of the social network

Hedging and invoicing strategies to reduce exchange rate exposure - a euro-area perspective

Domestic-currency invoicing and hedging allow internationally active firms to reduce their exposure to exchange rate variations. This paper argues that domestic-currency invoicing and hedging with exchange rate derivatives allow a fairly straightforward management of transaction and translation risk. Broader economic risk (which takes into account the impact of the exchange rate on competitiveness) is by its very nature harder to manage, but the paper argues that natural hedging provides possibilities for doing so. A novelty of this paper is a survey of actual hedging strategies and techniques of large euro-area corporations. The paper finds that euro-area exporters make ample use of instruments to limit the adverse impact of euro appreciation.Exchange rate risk, invoicing, hedging, derivatives, Hedging and invoicing strategies to reduce exchange rate exposure - a euro-area perspective, Economic Paper, D�hring