Structural Determinants of the Natural Rate of Unemployment in Canada

This paper presents empirical estimates of the policy and structural determinants of the natural rate of unemployment in Canada. The paper begins with a discussion of structural features of the economy which impinge on the adjustment of real wages to their equilibrium level. Estimates are presented showing how the generosity of the unemployment insurance system is related to past levels of unemployment. The empirical results indicate that government policies have been largely responsible for changes in the natrual rate, and hence can contribute to a reduction in the natural rate in the medium term.Natural rate of unemployment; Canada

North-South R&D Spillovers

We examine the extent to which developing countries that do little, if any research and development themselves benefit from R&D that is performed in the industrial countries. By trading with an industrial country that has large 'stocks of knowledge' from its cumulative R&D activities, a developing country can boost its productivity by importing a larger variety of intermediate products and capital equipment embodying foreign knowledge, and by acquiring useful information that would otherwise be costly to obtain. Our empirical results, which are based on observations over the 1971-90 period for 77 developing countries, suggest that R&D spillovers from the industrial countries in the North to the developing countries in the South are substantial.

Policy complementarities: The case for fundamental labor market reform

This paper argues that an important group of labor market policies are complementary in the sense that the effect of each policy is greater when implemented in conjunction with the other policies than in isolation. This may explain why the diverse, piecemeal labor market reforms in many European countries in recent years have had so little success in reducing unemployment. What is required instead is deeper labor market reforms across a broader range of complementary policies and institutions. To be politically feasible, these reforms must be combined with measures to address distributional issues

Structural Determinants of the Natural Rate of Unemployment in Canada

This paper presents empirical estimates of the policy and structural determinants of the natural rate of unemployment in Canada. The paper begins with a discussion of structural features of the economy which impinge on the adjustment of real wages to their equilibrium level. Estimates are presented showing how the generosity of the unemployment insurance system is related to past levels of unemployment. The empirical results indicate that government policies have been largely responsible for changes in the natrual rate, and hence can contribute to a reduction in the natural rate in the medium term

International R&D Spillovers and Institutions

The empirical analysis in "International R&D Spillovers" (Coe and Helpman, 1995) is first revisited by applying modern panel cointegration estimation techniques to an expanded data set that we have constructed for the purpose of this study. The new estimates confirm the key results reported in Coe and Helpman about the impact of domestic and foreign R&D capital stocks on TFP. In addition, we show that domestic and foreign R&D capital stocks have measurable impacts on TFP even after controlling for the impact of human capital. Furthermore, we extend the analysis to include institutional variables, such as legal origin and patent protection, in order to allow for parameter heterogeneity based on a country’s institutional characteristics. The results suggest that institutional differences are important determinants of total factor productivity and that they impact the degree of R&D spillovers.

A Systems Approach to Estimating the Natural Rate of Unemployment and Potential Output for the United States

The methodology used in this paper has three distinguishing features: the natural rate of unemployment and potential output are jointly estimated; estimation integrates wage and price data with "real" and structural data; and third, the methodology encompasses many of the methods found in the literature. The results indicate that potential output growth has recovered somewhat during the early 1990s, but remains below the rapid rates of increase in the late 1960s. The natural rate, after rising during the late 1960s and the 1970s, is found to have declined in the 1980s. The paper concludes with an assessment of medium-term prospects for potential output and the natural rate