The Impact of CAP Reforms on Farm Labour Structure. Factor Markets Working Document No. 63, August 2013

The labour force engaged in the agricultural sector is declining over time, and one can observe the reallocation of labour from family members to hired workers. Using farm-level data, this paper analyses the on-farm labour structure in Greece and assesses the factors driving its evolution over the period 1990-2008. The impact of agricultural policies and farm characteristics is examined in a dynamic panel analysis. Family and hired labour are found to be substitutes rather than complements, while agricultural support measures appear to negatively affect demand for both family and hired labour. Decoupled payments and subsidies on crops are found to have a significant impact on both sources of labour, as well as subsidies for rural development that do not favour on-farm labour use. The paper also finds that structural labour adjustments are the result of farm characteristics, such as farm size and location. The results are robust to various estimation techniques and specifications.

Inflation and Unemployment In EMU and the United States. ACES Working Papers No. 10, 2008

The original purpose of this paper was to see why the Phillips Curve numbers seem to be so much worse for the EMU countries than the United States since EMU was began operation in 1990. The problem is that there is no evidence of a Phillips curve relationship in EMU or in the United States during this seventeen year period. As can be seen in Figures 1 and 2, it just is not there. In about half the years unemployment and inflation moved in the opposite direction, as Phillips would predict, but in other half of the years they moved in the same direction. This may be a matter of time lags, with unemployment lagging inflation, but it seems clear that the Phillips curve is a poor tool for explaining these year to year outcomes in Europe or the United States.