Econom A Spring 2011

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Spring 2011 • Job Search, Emotional Well-Being, and Job Finding in a Period of Mass Unemployment: Evidence from High-Frequency Longitudinal Data By Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller • Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications By Annamaria Lusardi, Daniel Schneider, and Peter Tufano • Let's Twist Again: A High-Frequency Event-Study Analysis of Operation Twist and Its Implications for QE2 By Eric T. Swanson • An Exploration of Optimal Stabilization Policy By N. Gregory Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl • What Explains the German Labor Market Miracle in the Great Recession? By Michael C. Burda and Jennifer Hunt • Inflation Dynamics and the Great Recession By Laurence Ball and Sandeep Mazumder

The 2011 edition of OECD's periodic review of the Belgian economy. This edition includes chapters covering public finances, the labour market, and green growth.

"Brookings Papers on Economic Activity" (BPEA) provides academic and business economists, government officials, and members of the financial and business communities with timely research on current economic issues. Contents include - Recessions and the Costs of Job Loss Steve Davis (University of Chicago) and Til von Wachter (Columbia University) - What Do Small Businesses Do? Erik Hurst and Benjamin Wild Pugsley (University of Chicago) - Unemployment Insurance and Job Search in the Great Recession Jesse Rothstein (University of California-Berkeley) - The Effects of Quantitative Easing on Interest Rates: Channels and Implications for Policy Arvind Krishnamurthy and Annette Vissing-Jorgenson (Northwestern University) - Practical Monetary Policy: Examples from Sweden and the United States Lars E. O. Svensson (Sveriges Riksbank) - The Labor Market in the Great Recession--An Update to September 2011 Michael. W. L. Elsby (University of Edinburgh), Bart Hobijn (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco), Ay egul ahin (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), and Robert B. Valletta (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) - The Income- and Expenditure-Side Estimates of U.S. Output Growth--An Update to 2011Q2 Jeremy J. Nalewaik (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System)"

Recoge: 1. Economic developments at the aggregated level - 2. Prospects by individual economy : Member states - Acceding countries - Candidate countries - Other non-EU countries.

What makes people identify with Europe? To answer this question, this book analyzes the development and determinants of a common European identity among EU citizens from the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 to the recent financial and economic crisis. The author examines citizens’ identification with Europe for all EU member states, and systematically explores the theoretical and empirical implications of two turning points in the recent history of EU integration, namely the EU’s enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe in 2004/2007 and the financial and economic crisis that started in 2008. The book integrates theoretical approaches to European identity in sociology, social-psychology and EU public opinion research in a comprehensive model for explaining individual identification with Europe. The empirical analysis employs a multilevel framework to systematically assess the influence of individual characteristics and the political, economic, and social context on citizens’ feelings of identity. The long analysis period spanning from 1992 to the present allows inferences to be drawn about the long-term developments in the sources of European identification as well as the immediate impact of EU enlargement and the crisis on the determinants of European identification.

This comprehensive Handbook provides an in-depth analysis of the nature of East Asian economic integration alongside thoughtful insights into contemporary issues, such as agricultural development, structural transformation and East Asian trade, alongside skills and human capital development policies of ASEAN. Contributors also provide detailed explanations on trade, poverty and Aid for Trade, institutional reforms, regulatory reform and measuring integration.

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment, and idiosyncratic as well as aggregate labor market risk. The theoretical analysis shows that an increase in JSA and a reduction in UI reduce the output cost of recessions by making the labor market more fluid along the job finding margin and thus making the economy more resilient to macroeconomic shocks. In contarst, the effect of JSA and UI on the welfare cost of recessions is in general ambiguous. The paper also provides a quantitative appliation to the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, which improved JSA (Hartz III reform) and reduced UI (Hartz IV reform). According to the baseline calibration, the two labor market reforms led to a substantial reduction in the output cost of recessions and a moderate reduction in the welfare cost of recessions in Germany.