Use-wear analysis of an Amudian laminar assemblage from the Acheuleo-Yabrudian of Qesem Cave, Israel

In this paper the results of use-wear analysis of an Amudian lithic assemblage recently discovered at Qesem Cave, Israel, arc presented. Although very old. this assemblage maintains well-preserved traces of use that indicate that butchering activities and plants collecting were carried out at the site. Cut marks on faunal remains confirm the observations obtained by use-wear analysis. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Green shoots in the euro area : a real time measure

We show that an extension of the Markov-switching dynamic factor models that accounts for the speci cities of the day to day monitoring of economic developments such as ragged edges, mixed frequencies and data revisions is a good tool to forecast the Euro area recessions in real time. We provide examples that show the nonlinear nature of the relations between data revisions, point forecasts and forecast uncertainty. According to our empirical results, we think that the real time probabilities of recession are an appropriate statistic to capture what the press call green shoot

Employment fluctuations in a dual labor market

In light of the huge cross-country differences in job losses during the recent crisis, we study how labor market duality - meaning the coexistence of "temporary" contracts with low firing costs and "permanent" contracts with high firing costs - affects labor market volatility. In a model of job creation and destruction based on Mortensen and Pissarides (1994), we show that a labor market with these two contract types is more volatile than an otherwise-identical economy with a single contract type. Calibrating our model to Spain, we find that unemployment fluctuates 21% more under duality than it would in a unified economy with the same average firing cost, and 33% more than it would in a unified economy with the same average unemployment rate. In our setup, employment grows gradually in booms, due to matching frictions, whereas the onset of a recession causes a burst of firing of "fragile" low-productivity jobs. Unlike permanent jobs, some newly-created temporary jobs are already near the firing margin, which makes temporary jobs more likely to be fragile and means they play a disproportionate role in employment fluctuation