Unemployment Crisis - Challenge and Opportunity

Arbeitslosigkeit; Arbeitsmarktpolitik; Wirkungsanalyse; Langzeitarbeitslosigkeit; Sozialer Dienst; EU-Staaten

Wage Structure and Public Sector Employment: Sweden versus the United States 1970-2002

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8--10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by around 10 percentage points in 2002. Theories that equalize wages with marginal products can rationalize these disparate outcomes when we replace commonly used measures of total labor supplies by private sector employment. Our analysis suggests that the dramatic decline of the skill premium in Sweden is the result of an expanding public sector that today comprises roughly one third of the labor force, and that expansion has largely taken the form of drawing low-skilled workers into local government jobs that service the welfare state.Skill premium; employment; private sector; public sector; Sweden; United States.

The cash flow, return and risk characteristics of private equity

Using a unique dataset of private equity funds over the last two decades, this paper analyzes the cash flow, return, and risk characteristics of private equity. We document the draw down and capital return schedules for the typical private equity fund, and show that it takes several years for capital to be invested, and over ten years for capital to be returned to generate excess returns. We provide several determining factors for these schedules, including existing investment opportunities and competition amongst private equity funds. In terms of performance, we document that private equity generates excess returns on the order of five plus percent per annum relative to the aggregate public equity market. One interpretation of this magnitude is that it represents compensation for holding a 10-year illiquid investment.

Catching up with the Keynesians

This paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity-shock driven economies with \catching-up-with-the-Joneses" utility functions.The optimal tax policy is shown to a ect the economy countercyclically via procyclical taxes, i.e., \cooling down" the economy with higher taxes when it is \overheating" in booms and \stimulating" the economy with lower taxes in recessions to keep consumption up.Thus, models with catching-up-with-the-Joneses utility functions call for traditional Keynesian demand management policies.Parameter values from Campbell and Cochrane (1995) are also used to illustrate that the necessary labor taxes can be very high, in the order of 50 percent.However, Campbell and Cochrane's nonlinear version of the aspiration level in the catching-up-with-the-Joneses preferences has the additional implication that consumption bunching can be welfare enhancing.fiscal policy;business cycles;productivity;utility theory

On the decision to go public: Evidence from privately-held firms

We test recent theories of when companies go public which predict that 1) more companies will go public when outside valuations are high or have increased, 2) companies prefer going public when uncertainty about their future profitability is high, and 3) firms whose controlling shareholders enjoy large private benefits of control are less likely to go public. Our analysis tracks a set of 330 privately-held German firms which between 1984 and 1995 announced their intention to go public to see whether, when, and how they subsequently sold equity to outside investors. Controlling for private benefits, we find that the likelihood of firms completing an initial public offering increases in the firm's investment opportunities and valuations. We also show that these effects are distinct from factors that increase firms' demand for outside capital more generally. --Going public decision,IPO timing,Private benefits,Family firms

Indivisible Labor and Its Supply Elasticity: Do Taxes Explain European Employment?

We first scrutinize and challenge Prescott's (2002, 2004) quantitative analysis of the role of differences in taxes in explaining cross-country differences in labor market outcomes, and then defend an alternative model that assigns an important role to cross-country differences in social unemployment insurance institutions that Prescott argues can be safely ignored. In the process, we explore how the assumption of indivisible labor interacts with assumptions regarding the (in)completeness of financial markets and any frictions in the labor market, to determine the labor supply elasticity.Employment lotteries, indivisible labor, labor supply elasticity, taxation, unemployment, unemployment insurance

A supply-side explanation of European unemployment

This article offers a supply-side explanation of striking patterns in unemployment rates and duration of unemployment in European countries, compared with other member countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). The rise in long-term unemployment in Europe is attributed to the adverse incentive effects of generous welfare programs in times of economic turbulence.Unemployment - Europe