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This paper formalizes Irving Fisher's century-old model of bimetallism and adds the important \"disequilibrium\" dynamics to deal with the long periods during which bimetallic countries were on effective monometallic standards. It resolves a long standing puzzle in the bimetallic literature regarding the remarkable stability of the gold/silver price ratio in the nineteenth century by modeling the bimetallic mint ratio as a regulating barrier to the gold/silver price ratio. It thus provides a clean-cut example of a target-zone model that - in contrast to other such models in the literature - exhibits the main predicted nonlinearities in the data.

This paper examines the endogeneity of several structural variables which enter unemployment rate equations - the generosity of unemployment benefits, nonwage labor costs, the relative minimum wage, and the degree of unionization. It finds evidence of reverse causality for these structural variables based on causality tests. The structural unemployment rate equation is then estimated using instruments suggested by the empirical analysis of the structural variables. The paper confirms the earlier finding that the generosity of unemployment benefits, nonwage labor costs, and the relative minimum wage have a significant positive impact on the unemployment rate, but fails to find an effect for the degree of unionization.

This paper reviews the structure and trends of the U.S. welfare system and the U.S. Administration's reform proposals. It shows that, despite the attention the program receives, the welfare program is actually quite small and has experienced moderate rates of growth. However, the system does face serious problems. In particular, its structure sets up strong financial disincentives to paid employment and saving at the same time that its low level of benefits fails to lift low-income children and their families out of poverty.

The Administration's proposals to reform the U.S. health care system sought to provide for universal health insurance coverage while containing the growth of health care spending. This paper focuses on the latter issue and discusses the ability of regulatory and market-oriented reforms to achieve health care cost containment from several angles: an international comparison of national cost containment measures, a review of past cost containment efforts in the United States, and a discussion of the estimated effects on health care costs of alternative proposals to reform the U.S. health care system.

This paper examines recent developments in the Canadian labor market. Using disaggregated labor market data, various hypotheses concerning the slow employment growth and rise in unemployment since 1990 are evaluated. The analysis indicates that a large part of the recent rise in the unemployment rate may reflect an increase in the structural rather than the cyclical component of unemployment. Various sources of labor market rigidities that may have contributed to the increase in structural unemployment are examined. In particular, the role of the unemployment insurance system in contributing to labor market rigidity and measures for reforming this system, including the recent proposals of the government, are discussed. Finally, this paper examines active labor market policies that could help to alleviate structural unemployment.

This paper assesses the responsiveness of wages and labor force movements to employment shocks across British and U.S regions and across Europe using a multivariate vector autoregression technique. The paper finds inflexible real wages in all three areas in that each area's real wage responds very little to employment shocks. However, the response of the labor force to employment shocks is much greater in the United States compared to Europe. The strong labor force response in the United States prevents any persistence in relative regional unemployment rates whereas the lack of mobility in Europe results in persistent unemployment rate differentials across British regions and European nations. Europe must therefore adopt measures to reduce barriers to immobility if it is to succeed in moderating the persistence in relative unemployment rates.

The apparent slowdown in U.S. investment and productivity growth in recent years has led to a number of proposals to stimulate investment through the adoption of tax incentives. This paper describes the incentives that were contained in the February 1993 Budget and estimates their effect on the user cost of capital. The recent evidence regarding the effect of tax changes on investment in the United States is reviewed, and the likely effect of the Budget's proposals on investment and overall economic activity is simulated. The simulations suggest that the proposals would have had a stimulative but largely transitory effect on U.S. investment and output.

This note examines recent developments in the Canadian labor market to provide a partial assessment of the magnitude and nature of industrial restructuring in Canada. The implications of industrial restructuring for the medium- and long-term prospects for the Canadian economy are examined. The evidence presented in this note suggests that the recent increases in labor productivity may represent a cyclical phenomenon rather than a permanent increase in the rate of growth of productivity.

This paper assesses the relative importance of alternative explanations for the rise in long-term interest rates in the United States from October 1993 to April 1994. Standard econometric models of the term structure are shown to have a structural break in the early 1980s. An important reason for this change in the traditional term structure relationship appears to be an increase in the responsiveness of long-term rates to changes in the stance of monetary policy. Augmented term structure models that explicitly incorporate the role of monetary policy in determining the level of long-term rates are then constructed. These models track variations in the long-term rate better than traditional term structure models, but still leave a significant fraction of the recent increase in long-term rates unexplained.

This paper re-examines the cyclical behavior of prices using postwar quarterly data for the G-7. We confirm recent evidence that the price level is countercyclical. However, we find strong evidence that the inflation rate is procyclical in our sample. Our results show the importance of making a clear distinction between inflation and the cyclical component of the price level when reporting and interpreting stylized facts regarding business cycles.