Mind the gap between the policy announcements and implementation: The Youth Contract and Jobcentre Plus advisers' role as careers educators for 18–24-year olds

Access to careers education for young people has been in decline under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government due to changes in regulations and funding. Therefore it has become vital to deliver the commitments made in the Youth Contract to provide careers advice through Jobcentre Plus advisers. At the same time, other policy changes have put Jobcentre Plus advisers increasingly in the role of benefit enforcers. This paper explores how these two roles interact with each other and influence the experience of young people trying to access careers advice. We propose a framework that would encourage the development of a Jobcentre Plus fit for the purpose of the Youth Contract

Are we all in this together? Alleviating the childcare constraint for women in economic crises

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to advocate the use of gendered economic policies to stimulate a post Covid-19 recovery. We alert on the risk of ignoring the female dimension of the current crisis and of resorting again to austerity programmes that, like the ones enacted after the 2008 crisis, would hit women and mothers disproportionally harder than other groups. Design/methodology/approach: We use data from the British Household Panel Survey on female participation and account for gendered constraints and enablers missed by mainstream economics. Using a sequential empirical approach, we simulate various welfare policy scenarios that address factors, such as childcare costs, personal and social nudges, that could help women back into the labour market in the aftermath of a crisis. Findings: We found that incentive-type interventions, such as subsidies, promote female labour market participation more effectively than punishment-austerity type interventions, such as benefits’ cuts. Policies oriented to alleviate childcare constraints can be sustainable and effective in encouraging women back to work. Considering factors wider than the standard economic variables when designing labour market policies may provide fruitful returns. Originality: The sequential methodology enables the estimation of current and counterfactual incomes for each female in the sample and to calculate their prospective financial gains and losses in changing their labour market Status Quo, from not employed into employed or vice-versa. Welfare policies affect these prospective gains and losses and, by interacting with other factors, such as education, number and age of children and social capital, prompt changes in women’s labour market choices and decision

Exchange Rates and Macro News in Emerging Markets

This paper uses a VAR-GARCH(1,1) model to analyse mean and volatility spillovers between macro news (in the form of newspaper headlines) and the exchange rates vis-avis both the US dollar and the euro of the currencies of a group of emerging countries including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey over the period 02/1/2003-23/9/2014. The results suggest limited dynamic linkages between the first moments compared to the second moments, causality-in-variance being found in a number of cases. The conditional correlations also provide evidence of co-movement. Finally, the recent global financial crisis appears to have had a significant impact

Target zones: A theoretical and empirical approach to exchange rate determination and the use of optimal monetary policies

The first chapter of this dissertation analyzes a stochastic rational expectations macro model and target zones exchange rate regime in the context of optimal control policies. In the literature of target zones, monetary authorities are usually taken as being passive so long as the exchange rate is inside a band. This assumption negates the possibility of exploiting the degrees of freedom in pursuing domestic targets that the zones allow with respect to fixed exchange rates. We allow the central bank to be active and, according to its preferences, to achieve some targets. This attitude generates a domestic (as opposed to an institutional ) exchange rate band. This result enables us to explain the occurrence of intramarginal interventions. Also, by allowing the fundamentals to follow more general stochastic process, different results from the standard literature are derived. The second chapter analyzes a two-country stochastic rational expectation model under alternative hypotheses on central banks behaviors. In exploring the exchange rate dynamics under a target zones regime of when additional source of stochasticity coming from the foreign economy is introduced, severe technical problems arise and an analytical or even a numerical solution may fail to exist. This limits the use of the standard target zones model and stimulates future investigation toward alternative formulation of target zones capable of coping with more general assumption. In the third chapter we explore the issue of designing optimal monetary policies to achieve some desirable paths of growth of domestic variables when international financial markets are integrated and investors are risk averse. The presence of a foreign risk premium and a target zones band on the exchange rate increase the central bank\u27s opportunities of maneuvering both interest rates and exchange rates, unless the limit of the band are reached to stabilize the economy toward its golden age path of growth. We quantify this increased freedom of the central bank by simulating alternatives scenarios with the use of the Bank of Italy Quarterly Econometric Model

Rationality, Behavior and Switching Idiosincracies in the Euro-Dollar Exchange Rate

This paper examines the determinants of the €-$exchange rate, using the news approach to exchange rate modeling and some behavioral finance categories in the interpretation of its dynamics. A twice-daily frequency estimation was chosen, dividing the global trading day into an European Time Zone, ETZ (including also Asian trading), and an American Time Zone, ATZ. A new typology of news variables, unscheduled news, was employed, together with the traditional scheduled macroeconomic news. These former news, consisting of policy statements, market events, market beliefs, terror-related events turned out to be the main determinants of €-$ movements. Coefficient stability tests suggested to divide our 1999-2004 sample into three sub-periods roughly corresponding to the three phases of recent Euro history. The main finding of our analysis is the rejection of the semi-strong EMH once we move from the estimation over the entire sample to the three sub-periods. Here we find many lagged news variables to be significant, contrary to what EMH posits. The distribution of lagged news across time zones (ETZ and ATZ) and among the three sub-periods, indicates a substantial heterogeneity in the way news are decoded by market participants in the two trading zones and that exchange rates in ATZ react almost exclusively to American news, indicating that this zone influences the rest of the world but it is not affected by it. Scheduled news play a much bigger role in ATZ than in ETZ, especially the creation of new jobs in the US (the Non-farm Payroll). Exchange rate dynamics in ETZ is determined mostly by unscheduled news. [...

Internationalization of the curriculum: What does it mean in practice

Internationalisation of the curriculum is an issue of growing interest and importance for Higher Education in the light of the desire to recruit international students but also, more fundamentally, of the need to equip all students for life, work and ongoing learning in a global context. This means that internationalisation is arguably not only about teaching international students, but more broadly about all teaching and learning within multi-cultural, international contexts. It is about inclusivity, meeting the need of diverse students and preparing all graduates with the awareness and abilities they need to be effective in twenty first century “global” society