Long-term unemployment and short-term unemployment benefits: The changing nature of non-employment subsidies in Central and Eastern Europe

Non-employment rates in all central and eastern European countries have increased dranatically thoroughout the transition and are currently larger than those of the lowest income OECD countries. Non-employment benefits other than unemployment benefits are providing income support to this growing number of able-bodied individuals out of work. Under the present design of unemployment benefits and social assistance, there may be serious incentive problems related to the shift from unemployment benefits to other, means-tested, non-employment benefits and this shift occurs in transition countries at rather early stages of an unemployment spell; these incentive problems are bound to become particularly acute in a less inflationary environment.     

Why are establishments so heterogeneous?

Changes in the size of establishments — as opposed to the turnover of workers across a given set of jobs — account for a non-negligible component of gross workers flows. Based on a rich database of establishment-level employment records in western Germany, this paper analyses the magnitude and determinants of job turnover and its relation with labour turnover. Consistently with findings from other countries, it is shown that job turnover is mainly the byproduct of the dispersion of establishment-level outcomes within any industry rather than of job reallocation across different sectors. The role played by disturbances to consumer preferences over differentiated products is also assessed in an attempt to shed some light on the determinants of this tremendous heterogeneity of establishment-level employment changes within each industry.The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD. The author would like to thank Boyan Jovanovic and an anonymous referee for useful comments on an initial draft.     

What Happened to European Unemployment?

Summary  Many academic papers were still being written on mass unemployment in Europe. While, unemployment in the EU15 was falling dramatically. Not only academics, but also European workers at large did not seem to appreciate these labour market developments. I offer two explanations for this puzzling deterioration of workers perceptions of the labour market in spite of disappearing unemployment: (i) labour market risk increased, and (ii) employment growth occurred at the cost of stagnating labour productivity. This means that the new labour market offers a worse risk-return combination. Strategies to address these issues are discussed in the final section of the paper. This paper provides an extended version of the first Willem F. Duisenberg Lecture, held at the University of Amsterdam on February 28, 2008. I am particularly grateful to NIAS for this opportunity and to Petry Kievit for having greatly improved my English.     

Learning from Transition Economies: Assessing Labor Market Policies across Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern European countries transformedradicallytheir unemployment benefit systems and altered significantly the composition of their active labor market policy budgets in the transition process. Their recent experience is valuable from an OECD country perspective. Based on a rich data base of district-level outflows from registered unemployment and active labor market policy expenditures and intakes, this paper provides a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of active labor market policies in Central and Eastern Europe. Estimates of an augmented matching function do not point to significant deadweight losses associated with active program intakes. This does not rule out the possibility that active policies displace those already employed, but such substitution effects may not be undesirable given the stagnancy of the unemployment pools in these countries.J. Comp. Econom.,December 1997,25(3), pp. 366–384. Università Bocconi and IGIER, Istituto di Economia Politica, via Sarfatti, 25, 20136 Milan, Italy.     

UNCOVERED INTEREST PARITY IN ARGENTINA, BRAZIL, CHILE, AND MEXICO: A UNIT ROOT TEST APPLICATION WITH PANEL DATA

The aim of this study was to test uncovered interest parities for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, for the January 1990–December 2001 period, with the use of the rational expectation hypothesis. We also intend to evaluate the degree of mobility of foreign capital in these political jurisdictions, using panel data estimations, with unit root tests proposed by Levin and Lin (1992) , and Im, Pesaran and Shin (1997) . The econometric results indicate the rejection of uncovered interest parity (UIP), for the period under study, for the group consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. However, the UIP hypothesis is not rejected for the group consisting of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico for the January 1991–December 2000 period.     

Match rigging and the career concerns of referees

This paper contributes to the literature on career concerns and corruption by drawing on extensive information on the performance of referees and records from Calciopoli, a judicial inquiry carried out in 2006 on corruption in the Italian football league. Unlike previous studies, we can analyse in detail the assignment of the referees to the most important matches, which is an important step in their career. Moreover, we can relate this choice to the performance of referees in previous matches and the evaluations they received in this context. We find that referees involved in match rigging were promoted to top games and that their evaluation was not negatively affected by their involvement in documented episodes of match rigging.     

Crypto-assets portfolio optimization under the omega measure

Abstract

Crypto-currencies, or crypto-assets, represent a new class of investment assets. The traditional portfolio analysis approach of Markowitz is not appropriate for use with portfolios containing crypto-assets, as the model requires that the investor have a quadratic utility function or that the returns be normally distributed, which isn’t the case for crypto-assets. We develop a portfolio optimization model based on the Omega measure which is more comprehensive than the Markowitz model, and apply this to four crypto-asset investment portfolios by means of a numerical application. The results indicate that these portfolios should favor traditional market assets over crypto-assets. In the case of portfolios formed only by crypto-assets, there is no clear preference in favor of any crypto-asset in particular.     

An Activating Social Security System

Convergence to the Lisbon employment targets requires absorbing large pools of long-term jobseekers, increasing labour force participation and dealing with a sizeable informal sector, composed for the most of low-productivity jobs. The purpose of this paper is to review the main design features of an activating social security strategy reconciling shifts of these three margins with the redistributive institutions characterising the European landscape. Evidence of experimental studies is reviewed. It is argued that EU supra-national authorities should confine themselves to promoting the exchange of information about best practices in welfare-to-work policies as implementation of this approach should be done at a decentralised level. Issues related to the implementation of this activating strategy in the countries that are more distant from the Lisbon targets are also discussed. A first draft of this paper was prepared for the Dutch Presidency Conference on ‘More People at Work’, Amsterdam, 25–26 October, 2004. I am grateful to participants in that conference, Henk Don and two anonymous referees for valuable comments.