Wealth and Income Inequality in Europe

While it has long been apparent that global levels of wealth and income inequality have been steadily increasing since the 1970s, the issue received scant attention in Europe until the recent fi nancial crisis and the resulting Great Recession illuminated for the general public just how great the chasm between the very rich and everybody else had grown. This realisation was coupled with an increased focus on inequality among economists and other academics, leading to a fresh drive for policy ideas to remedy the alarming trend. This Forum comprises a diverse range of viewpoints on the recent history and dynamics of inequality within Europe, each striving to defi ne the root causes in the various countries being examined. The defi nition of these causes, of course, can inform the direction of policies aimed at alleviating the growing inequality in many European countries and thereby curtail one of the major political and social issues of our time.     

Accounting for persistence and volatility of good-level real exchange rates: The role of sticky information

Volatile and persistent real exchange rates are observed not only in aggregate series but also in micro-price data at the retail level. Kehoe and Midrigan (2007) recently showed that, under a standard assumption on nominal price stickiness, empirical frequencies of micro price adjustment cannot replicate the time series properties of the Law of One Price (LOP) deviations. We extend their sticky price model by combining good-specific price adjustment with information stickiness in the sense of Mankiw and Reis (2002). Our framework allows for multiple cities within a country. Using a panel of U.S.-Canadian city pairs, we estimate a dynamic price adjustment process for 165 individual goods. Under a reasonable assumption on the money growth process, we show that the model matches the persistence of the LOP deviation for the median good and accounts for the majority of its volatility when information updates occur every 12 months.     

Employment expectations and uncertainties ahead of the new German minimum wage

This article analyzes announcement effects of the new statutory minimum wage on employment expectations and uncertainties in Germany. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach applied to the IAB Establishment Panel, employers affected by the minimum wage show an increased employment uncertainty and a 0.9% points drop in their expected employment growth. Using the same identification strategy with data from 2015, the treatment effect on actual employment growth of affected employers matches the employers' expectation. Hence, an analysis of employer expectations seems to be promising to detect employment effects of policy changes before they come into force.     

Country Size and Economic Fluctuations

This paper investigates the character of business cycles across large and small economies. Empirically, G-7 countries have less volatile investment, consumption, and trade balance ratios, higher correlations between domestic sacing and investment rates, and about the same correlation of the trade-balance ratio and investment ratio as 68 smaller countries. These observations are consistent with a standard one-sector two-country general equilibrium model in which the only source of heterogeneity is country size. Since many developing countries are small, these findings suggest that even absent differences in markets and instutitions, economic fluctuations would be more severe in developing countries.     

Ideational item Avoiding the pitfalls of managementThink

Productive, structured, and efficient thinking is often the only kind encouraged by companies—at least, until they notice that such thinking can harden into unimaginative and rigid patterns. Every manager and every company needs to take time to try out new thinking patterns and look at possibilities in new ways.     

Dynamic common factors in large cross-sections

This paper develops a method to analyze large cross-sections with non-trivial time dimension. The method (i) identifies the number of common shocks in a factor analytic model; (ii) estimates the unobserved common dynamic component; (iii) shows how to test for fundamentalness of the common shocks; (iv) quantifies positive and negative comovements at each frequency. We illustrate how the proposed techniques can be used for analyzing features of the business cycle and economic growth.     

Index futures trading and stock price volatility: Evidence from Denmark and France

This study uses an EGARCH methodology to investigate the impact of index futures trading on the price volatility of two European stock markets. The results show that index futures trading has changed the distribution of stock returns in Denmark and France, however, it has not increased stock price volatility. There is evidence that futures trading has dampened stock price fluctuations in France. The results further show that stocks in Denmark and France exhibit strong volatility persistence and asymmetry, especially during the post-futures period.     

Foreign exchange market regularities in a developing economy

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the ‘empirical regularities’ observed for exchange rates in the major foreign exchange markets apply equally to the case of a developing economy such as Singapore.