The paper distinguishes between the impact of th EMU on nominal wage flexibility and on equilibrium real wage and unemployment levels. A preceived need to increase nominal wage flexibility as a substitute for domestic monetary policy and a tendency to less real wage moderation in the EMU are likely to promote informal bargaining co-ordination and social pacts in the medium run. But such co-ordiantion is not likely to be sustainable in the long run, as it conflicts with other forces working in the direction of decentralization and deunionisation. This could lead to more government intervention in wage setting during a transitional period. Although monetary unification will strengthen the incentives for higher-level transnational co-ordination of wage bargaining, such a development is improbable in view of the co-ordination costs involved. If transitional co-ordination develops, it is most likely to occur within multinational firms.
We show in a union-bargaining model that a decrease in the unemployment benefit level increases not only equilibrium employment, but also nominal wage flexibility, and thus reduces employment variations in the case of nominal shocks. Long-term wage contracts lead to higher expected real wages and hence higher expected unemployment than short-term contracts. Therefore lower benefits reduce the expected utility gross of contract costs of a union member more with long-term than with short-term contracts and thus create an incentive for shorter contracts. Incentives for employers work in the same direction. Lower taxes associated with lower benefits also tend to make short-term contracts more attractive.
In order to get a more complete picture of how labor supply is affected by economic incentives, the effects on absenteeism and not just on contracted hours should be taken into account. In particular, the effects on absenteeism due to sick leave can be considerable. In this paper we examine whether the level of sick leave compensation affects sick leave behavior. Using time-series data for Sweden spanning a long period (1955-99) with numerous changes of the compensation level, we generally find strong effects of the expected sign. Reforms implying more generous compensation for sick leave tend to be associated with permament increases in total sick leave per person employed and vice versa. These findings are reinforced in a panel study covering the 1983-91 period.
Socioeconomic conditions and values have changed considerably since the emergence of elaborate welfare-state arrangements during the first decades after World War II. For instance, recent socioeconomic changes have created new needs (justifications) for intertemporal reallocations of income as well as for protection against new types of income risks. Some socioeconomic changes have also undermined the financial viability of a number of traditional welfare-state arrangements. This paper emphasizes developments in the labor market and changes in the structure and preferences of the family. A number of alternative welfare-state reforms are considered in the paper.
Children who can count on support from altruistic parents may not try hard to succeed in the labor market. Moreover, parental altruism makes withdrawal of such support non-credible. To promote work effort, parents may want to instill norms which later cause their children to experience guilt or shame associated with failure to support themselves. While social insurance pools risk across families, we show that it also creates a free-rider problem among parents in terms of norm formation. We also examine the formation of norms requiring children to support their parents financially in old age.
An intertemporal general equilibrium model of criminal behavior is used to analyze the effect on crime of changing policy parameters. The policy parameters are the length of the prison term, the severity of punishment, and the amount of police resources. The number of crimes in society can be decomposed into an incentive part, an incarceration part, and a crime competition part. The magnitudes of these three components are studied by means of empirical data from England and the US.
The optimal weights on indicators in models with partial informatoin about the state of the economy and forward-looking variables are derived and interpreted, both for equilibria under discretion and under commitment. The private sector is assumed to have information about the state of the economy that the policymaker does not possess. Certainty-equivalence is shown to apply, in the sense that optimal policy reactions to optimally estimated states of the economy are independent of the degree of uncertainty. The usual separation principle does not hold, since the estimation of the state of the economy is not independent of optimization and is in general quite complex. We present a general characterization of optimal filtering and control in settings of this kind, and discuss an application of our methods to the problem of the optimal use of "real-time" macroeconomic data in the conduct of monetary policy.