In a search model of production, where agents accumulate heterogeneous amounts of human capital, an individual worker's wage depends on average human capital in the searching population.
The authors document the recent evolution of the self-employment rate in Canada. Between 1987 and 1998, the self-employment rate rose 3.5 percentage points from 13.8 per cent to 17.3 per cent.
Using French data on industrial firms over the period 1989-2001, the authors estimate a "flexible" Translog production function that accounts for the volumes and durations of factor utilization.
Although a number of studies have demonstrated the importance of the degree of factor utilization in economic analysis, the impact of the durations of utilization in a production function remains largely unknown, particularly in terms of the duration of equipment utilization.
Entrepreneurship is a key factor in promoting growth in output and employment. Consequently, to encourage new start-ups, most governments in developed countries have public venture capital programs.
The author explains how self-enforcing labour contracts can enhance the performance of macroeconomic models. He exposes the benefits of using these dynamic contracts to account for some puzzling macroeconomic facts regarding the dynamics and persistence of employment, consumption and output.
Microfinance institutions now serve over 10 million poor households in the developing and developed world, and much of their success has been attributed to their innovative use of peer group lending. There is very little empirical evidence, however, to suggest that group lending schemes offer a superior institutional design over lending programs that serve individual borrowers.
It has been well documented that the education premium measured by the wage difference between university and high school graduates has remained constant over the past two decades in Canada. Despite this stable pattern at the aggregate level, skill-biased technology could have important implications for the inter-industry wage structure.
The existing macroeconometric evidence lends support to the wage Phillips curve by showing a negative relation between the rate of change in wages and the unemployment rate, conditional on lagged price inflation. Most theoretical models of wage setting, however, generate a "wage curve," described by a negative relation between the level of the real wage and unemployment.