Profit Sharing, Capital Formation and the NAIRU

This paper reconsiders the impact of different remuneration systems on aggregate employment. Contrary to common wisdom on this topic, we show that the switch from a fixed wage economy to a share economy results in lower aggregate unemployment. An additional innovation of this paper is the endogeneity of the capital stock decision of the firm, which enables us to assess and reject the common "disincentive-to-invest" criticism of a share economy.     

The unemployment structure of the US states

This paper analyses the time series properties of the unemployment rates of the US economy using a regional disaggregated level. Our results are, in general, favorable to the rejection of the presence of a unit root in these variables. However, we can also observe that this conclusion is clearly qualified by the level of disaggregation employed. We also find robust evidence in favor of the presence of some breaks in the evolution of these unemployment rates. We subsequently offer an estimation of the NAIRU, which is based on the use of the Bai–Perron procedure.     

非加速型通货膨胀下的失业率研究

作为判断通货膨胀率变化趋势的先行指标,NAIRU在西方宏观经济政策制定和讨论中经常被提及、关注,其基础是短期菲利普斯曲线.在中国经济转型时期,城乡劳动力市场结构有着不同于西方劳动力结构的特性.由此,失业率和通货膨胀率之间的联系和短期菲利普斯曲线暗含的逻辑存在一定的差异,NAIRU作为判断中国通货膨胀率趋势的先行指标具有一定的局限性.     

就业弹性、自然失业和宏观经济政策--为什么经济增长没有带来显性就业?

尽管通常的计算低估了中国的就业弹性 ,但调整后的弹性数值仍属偏低。为什么经济的增长没有带来相应的就业增长呢 ?首先 ,反周期的宏观经济政策对解决自然失业是无能为力的 ;其次 ,在反周期的宏观经济政策所能调节的周期性失业方面 ,由于宏观经济政策所引导的投资方向往往是就业密集度较低的行业 ,进而导致反周期措施拉动就业的能力大为降低。因此 ,完善劳动力市场机制、加强职业培训体系建设、推动高就业产业发展 ,应成为经济政策的重点。     

Consumption and Welfare: Two Views of Value Added

The standard view is that value is added to raw material by labor and capital. The question here discussed is whether or not raw material must contain value previously added by nature, or whether it can be simply inert indestructible building blocks. Can humanly added value substitute for value added by nature? If the answer were yes, it should be possible, since matter-energy is not destroyed in consumption, to substitute the waste flow of matter-energy for the flow of fresh natural resources (raw materials). But this would contradict the second law of thermodynamics. The quality of low entropy is what differentiates raw material from waste, and we know of no process whose net effect is to lower the entropy of the total system on which we depend. We must focus more on “that to which value is added,” and not just on value added. This is especially true as the former more and more replaces the latter as the limiting factor in production. Further consequences of the two different views about value added for theory and policy are discussed.     

Simple Monetary Policy Rules Under Model Uncertainty

Using stochastic simulations and stability analysis, the paper compares how different monetary policy rules perform in a moderately nonlinear model with a time-varying NAIRU. Rules that perform well in linear models but implicitly embody backward-looking measures of real interest rates (such as conventional Taylor rules) or substantial interest rate smoothing perform very poorly in models with moderate nonlinearities, particularly when policymakers tend to make serially-correlated errors in estimating the NAIRU. This challenges the practice of evaluating policy rules within linear models, in which the consequences of responding myopically to significant overheating are extremely unrealistic.     

System estimates of potential output and the NAIRU

This paper proposes a new approach for estimating potential output and the NAIRU. The methodology models these key unobservable economic variables as latent stochastic trends within a trivariate system of observables comprising information on unemployment, GDP, and inflation. Identification is achieved through the use of a standard version of Okun's law and a Phillips curve. The performance of the procedure is investigated using Swedish quarterly data covering the time period 1970:1–1996:3. First version received: June 1997/final version received: September 1998     

Recombinant Slave Equilibria and Their Cure: Living Wage Full Employment

Scapegoating and slavery are effects of ordinary necessitous interpersonal relations that are naturally selected, extant in all familial and societal hierarchal equilibria, and evolved from primordial parasitism through our primate cousins in order to manage uncertainty. As such, slavery predates and survives all legal strictures. Although social equilibria have progressed equitably in the developed world, it is suggested that slavery's modern cure will only be found by precluding the genetic proclivity to exclude with an actual living-wage, full-employment economy.     

The European Commission’s new NAIRU: Does it deliver?

The non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is a key component of potential output and as such critically affects output gap estimates. In May 2014, the European Commission changed its specification of the NAIRU for several countries and lowered its NAIRU estimates – in the case of Spain from 26.6% to 20.7% for 2015. To test the dependence of the new NAIRU on unemployment versus structural factors, we run counterfactual simulations applying 1SD shocks to actual unemployment and to the structural variable – real unit labour costs. We find that the NAIRU in its new specification is still largely determined by actual unemployment. This calls in question both the interpretation of potential output estimates as barriers to more vigorous inflation-stable economic activity and the accuracy of structural deficit figures.     

Measuring uncertainty of the euro area NAIRU: Monte Carlo and empirical evidence for alternative confidence intervals in a state space framework

This paper investigates uncertainty around point estimates of the euro area NAIRU in a state space framework. The relative accuracy of alternative measures of uncertainty for state space models are compared using Monte Carlo simulations. A direct bootstrap method yields confidence intervals with lower coverage probability than confidence intervals based on mean squared errors (MSE) approximations. The degree of uncertainty of the euro area NAIRU is estimated with a trivariate state space model. The direct bootstrap method shows the narrowest confidence interval compared with the MSE approximations. However, the wider intervals based on MSE approximations are narrow enough for the identification of some periods in time where observed unemployment and the NAIRU differ significantly.