The Economic Future of Europe

After three years of near stagnation, the mood in Europe is definitely gloomy. Many doubt that the European model has a future. In this paper, I argue that things are not so bad, and there is room for optimism. Over the last thirty years, productivity growth has been much higher in Europe than in the United States. Productivity levels are roughly similar in the European Union and in the United States today. The main difference is that Europe has used some of the increase in productivity to increase leisure rather than income, while the U.S. has done the opposite. Turning to the present, a deep and wide ranging reform process is taking place. This reform process is driven by reforms in financial and product markets. Reforms in those markets are in turn putting pressure for reform in the labor market. Reform in the labor market will eventually take place, but not overnight and not without political tensions. These tensions have dominated and will continue to dominate the news; but they are a symptom of change, not a reflection of immobility.

The automatic fiscal stabilizers: quietly doing their thing - commentary

Fiscal policy ; Consumption (Economics) ; Business cycles ; Economic stabilization

The Crisis: Basic Mechanisms and Appropriate Policies

Finanzmarktkrise; Wirtschaftskrise; Konjunktur; Securitization; Immobilienmarkt; Welt

Current Account Deficits in Rich Countries

Current account imbalances have steadily increased in rich countries over the last 20 years. While the U.S. current account deficit dominates the numbers and the news, other countries, especially within the Euro area, are also running large deficits. These deficits are different from the Latin American deficits of the early 1980s, or the Mexican deficit of the early 1990s. They involve rich countries; they reflect mostly private saving and investment decisions, and fiscal deficits often play a marginal role; and the deficits are financed mostly through equity, FDI, and own-currency bonds rather than through bank lending. Yet, there appears a widely shared worry that these deficits are too large, and government intervention is required. My purpose, in this lecture, is to examine the logic of this argument. I ask the following question: Assume that deficits reflect private saving and investment decisions. Assume also that people and firms have rational expectations. Should the government intervene, and, if so, how? To answer the question, I construct a simple benchmark. In the benchmark, the outcome is first best and there is no need nor justification for government intervention. I then introduce simple distortions in either goods, labor, or financial markets, and characterize the equilibrium in each case. I derive optimal policy and the implications for the current account. I show that optimal policy may or may not lead to smaller current account deficits. I see the model and the extensions very much as a first pass. Sharper conclusions require a better understanding of the exact nature and the extent of distortions, and we do not have it. Such understanding is needed however to improve the quality of the current debate.

Macroeconomic implications of shifts in the relative demand for skills

Besides widening wage inequality, if the demand for skills continues to increase it will probably reduce aggregate employment. Policy measures to offset the impact of increased demand for skills on wage inequality and employment would be very costly. Moreover, given local funding of primary and secondary education a sufficiently large supply response cannot be assumed.Education ; Labor supply ; Unemployment

Unemployment: Getting the Questions Right - and some of the answers

This paper analyzes the issue of persistent high unemployment. It focuses on two channels of persistence. The first is capital accumulation. The paper analyzes investment decisions under imperfect competition, focusing in particular on the effects of demand and cost shocks on investment, capital composition and bankruptcies, and their effect on employment and unemployment. The second is labor supply. The paper analyzes the various channels through which the unemployed may become disenfranchised, leading to higher equilibrium unemployment. In both cases, it briefly reviews and assesses the available empirical evidence. It ends by drawing several implications.

Wage Bargaining and Unemployment Persistence

This paper looks at models of unemployment which make two central assumptions. The first is that wages are bargained between firms and employed workers, and that unemployment affects the outcome only to the extent that it affects the labor market prospects of either employed workers or of firms. The second is that the duration of unemployment affects either the search behavior or the skills of the unemployed, and/or the perceptions of firms of such skills. It argues that such models may explain riot only the evolution of European unemployment over the last two decades -an evolution which triggered their development, but many of the cyclical features of labor markets in general.

Current and Anticipated Deficits, Interest Rates and Economic Activity

There is widespread feeling that current deficits, in Europe and the U.S.,may hurt rather than help the recovery. This paper examines some of the issues involved, through a sequence of three models.The first model focuses on sustainability and characterizes its determinants. It suggests that the issue of sustainability may indeed ber elevant in some countries.The second model focuses on the effects of fiscal policy on real interestrates, and in particular on the relative importance of the level of deficits andthe level of debt in determining interest rates.The third model focuses on the effects of fiscal policy on the speed of the recovery. It shows how a sharply increasing fiscal expansion might be initially contractionary rather than expansionary.

The Wage Price Spiral

This paper rehabilitates the old wage price spiral. It shows that, after an increase in aggregate demand, the process of adjustment of nominal prices and nominal wages results from attempts by workers to maintain or increase their real wage and by firms to maintain or increase their markups of prices over wages. Under continuous price and wage setting, the process of adjustment would be instantaneous ; under staggering of price and wage decisions, the adjustment takes time. The more inflexible real wages and markups are to shifts in demand, the higher is the degree of price level inertia, the longer lasting are the effects of aggregate demand on output.