Books in the Studies in Contemporary Economics series

European central bank policy is already taking place today in an informal way. It comprises, in short, European exchange rate management and interest rate policy decisions within and without the European Monetary System (EMS).

After unification large amounts of money were spent to retrain the East Germany labour force in order to ease the transition to the new market economy. This book uses microeconometric methods and individual data to evaluate the impact of these training programmes on the participants' labour market situation.

the relation between unemployment and vacancies, was anything but stable, thus requiring a care ful distinction between dynamic loops around a (stable?) long-run Beveridge curve and possible shifts due to, say, an increasing mismatch between labor supplied and demanded.

This book is the result of five years of research that I carried out as a research fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics of the University of Amsterdam.

A macroeconomic disequilibrium model is developed for theFederal Republic of Germany. Starting with a microeconomicmodel of firm's behaviour, the optimal dynamic adjustment ofemployment and investment is derived.

One is the micro economic theory of consumer behavior, the other one the role of space in economic processes. In more advanced versions of microeconomic consumer theory its economic actor may face uncertainty, have to allocate resources over time, or have to take into ac count the characteristics of products, but rarely deals with space.

The analysis will be conducted within an IS-LM model augmen-ted by the dynamics of money wages, private capital andpublic debt.This in turn requires a dynamic path of monetary and fiscalpolicy: As a response to the shock, the central bankcontinuouslyadapts the quantity of money so as to keep upfull employment all the time.

In parallel with the movement toward widening and deeping of western European economic integration, we find an increased integration of eastern Europe to world trade and finance as well as regional integration in North America and in East Asia.

Modem economic research has shown that both of these fields of economic causalities - which are themselves afIected by a wide variety of interdependencies - detennine the economic destiny of the national economies and of their actors in the industrial, newly industrializing, transitional and developing countries.

This is modeled by application of the concept of thehazard rate which denotes the conditional exit rate fromunemployment over time given elapsed unemployment duration.

The Iabor demand for immigrants has declined in the last 15 years while the foreign population and Iabor supply has increased. The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the communist regimes in East Europe further increased the blue collar Iabor supply and strengthened the competition for foreign workers on the German Iabor market.