Domestic Jobs and Foreign Wages: Labour Demand in Swedish Multinationals

The labour demand decisions of multinational corporations (MNCs) are likely to depend not only on domestic, but also on foreign labour costs. This paper tests this hypothesis by estimating labour demand equations for a sample of Swedish MNCs. Indeed, higher foreign costs increase an MNC's Swedish employment and reduces its foregin employment. As MNCs become more important in many OECD countries, the role of foreign labour costs in the determination of aggregate domestic employment is likley to increase.

Foreign Direct Investment

This paper argues that the liberalisation of foregin direct investment (FDI) has made labour costs more important to domestic investment and long-run labour demand. It provides evidence from British and German data that is consistent with this view. First, high unit labour costs increase FDI outflows and lower FDI inflows. Second, the effect of unit labour costs on domestic manufacturing investment was more negative in the high-FDI 1980s than in the low-FDI 1970s, and this change was concentrated in high-FDI industries. The implied effect on long-run labour demand is substantial.

Price Level Targeting and Risk Management

Many argue that, in the presence of a lower bound on nominal interest rates, central banks should use a risk management approach for setting policy, which implies commit- ting to a more expansionary policy to deal with uncertainty about the economic recovery. Using a standard model for monetary policy analysis, I study the effects of an uncertain future for both price level targeting and nominal GDP level targeting. The results clarify that, during lower bound episodes, the extent to which policy can overcome uncertainty depends crucially on the choice of policy framework

Labor Market Effects of Immigration - Evidence from Neighborhood Data

This paper combines individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with economic and demographic postcode-level data from administrative records to analyze the effects of immigration on wages and unemployment probabilities of high- and low-skilled natives. Employing an instrumental variable strategy and utilizing the variation in the population share of foreigners across regions and time, we find no support for the hypothesis of adverse labor market effects of immigration.In diesem Papier werden Individualdaten des Sozio-Ökonomischen Panels (SOEP) mit ökonomischen und demographischen Informationen auf Postleitzahlebene aus administrativen Daten verknüpft, um den Effekt von Zuwanderung auf Löhne und die Wahrscheinlichkeit von Arbeitslosigkeit von niedrig- und hochqualifizierten Einheimischen zu analysieren. Unter Verwendung eines Instrumentvariablenansatzes und unter Ausnutzung der regionalen und zeitlichen Variation des Anteils von Ausländern in der Bevölkerung unterstützen unsere Ergebnisse nicht die Hypothese, dass Zuwanderung negative Auswirkungen auf den Arbeitsmarkterfolg von Einheimischen hat

Reducing Economic Imbalances in the Euro Area: Some Remarks on the Current Stability Programs, 2011–14

This paper evaluates whether the 2011 national stability programs (SPs) of the euro area countries are instrumental in achieving economic stability in the European Monetary Union (EMU). In particular, we analyze how the SPs address the double challenge of public deficits and external imbalances. Our analysis rests, first, on the accounting identities of the public, private, and foreign financial balances; and second, on the consideration of all SPs at once rather than separately. We find that conclusions are optimistic regarding GDP growth and fiscal consolidation, while current account rebalancing is neglected. The current SPs reach these conclusions by assuming strong global export markets, entrenched current account imbalances within the EMU as well as the deterioration of private financial balances in the current account deficit countries. By means of our simulations we conclude, on the one hand, that the failure of favorable global macroeconomic developments to materialize may lead to the opposite of the desired stability by exacerbating imbalances in the euro area. On the other hand, given symmetric efforts at rebalancing, the simulation suggests that for surplus countries that reduce their current account, a more expansionary fiscal policy will likely be required to maintain growth rates

Fiscal Policy and the Economics of Financial Balances

This paper presents the main features of the macroeconomic model being used at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, which has proven to be a useful tool in tracking the current financial and economic crisis. We investigate the connections of the model to the New Cambridge approach, and discuss other recent approaches to the evolution of financial balances for all sectors of the economy. We will finally show the effects of fiscal policy in the model, and its implications for the proposed fiscal stimulus on the U.S. economy. We show that the New Cambridge hypothesis, which claimed that the private sector financial balance would be stable relative to income in the short run, does not hold for the short term in our model, but it does hold for the medium/long term. This implies that the major impact of the fiscal stimulus in the long run will be on the external imbalance, unless other measures are taken

Gathering Insights on the Forest from the Trees: A New Metric for Financial Conditions

By incorporating the Harvey accumulator into the large approximate dynamic factor framework of Doz et al. (2006), we are able to construct a coincident index of financial conditions from a large unbalanced panel of mixed frequency financial indicators. We relate our financial conditions index, or FCI, to the concept of a financial crisis using Markov-switching techniques. After demonstrating the ability of the index to capture crisis periods in U.S. financial history, we present several policy-geared threshold rules for the FCI using Receiver Operator Characteristics (ROC) curve analysis