Nicholas Horsewood

The Causes of Unemployment in Interwar Australia

This paper examines the factors contributing to the rise in unemployment in Australia during the depression of the 1930s and to its decline in the subsequent recovery. While previous writers have generally argued that demand side variables were predominant, it has also claimed that excessive real wages created unemployment. The Layard-Nickell model, which has been used to examine the relationship between real wages and unemployment in interwar Britain, is estimated from Australian data. The results of the estimation confirm that demand side variables in the form of changes in government spending and in the terms of trade were important in both the downturn and the recovery. Although real wages affected employment and wage indexation procedures resulted in some real wage rigidity this was not a major contributor to unemployment. In addition wage indexation resulted in a high degree of flexibility of money wages, so that nominal inertia was not a problem This is in contrast to a country, such as the UK, where wages are determined by collective bargaining rather than by formal wage regulation. No evidence was found that the much discussed decision of the Commonwealth Court to reduce real wages by 10% was effective.

Unemployment in Interwar Germany: An Analysis of the Labor Market, 1927 1936

This article contributes to the debate on the causes of unemployment in interwar Germany. It applies the Layard-Nickell model of the labor market to interwar data. The results indicate that demand shocks, combined with nominal inertia in the labor market, were important in explaining unemployment. Real wage pressures due to procedures for wage determination were a major influence on unemployment, but were partly offset by movements in other supply-side variables, such as the replacement ratio and the pricing policy of cartels. Demand- and supply-side variables were mutually reinforcing in the Great Depression and in the recovery under the Nazis.

Price bubbles and policy interventions in the Chinese housing market

The recent dramatic increases in house prices have led to considerable attention being focused on housing markets in China. Using a unique dataset of city-level house prices and rents, this paper investigates the presence of price bubbles in major Chinese city housing markets. Our findings show evidence of price bubbles in most housing markets, even though the bubbles might be, to a large extent, mitigated by strong government intervention. In order to distinguish rational bubbles from irrational bubbles, we extend the existing work to allow a deterministic time trend and break points in the unit root test of house price–rent ratios. As a consequence, our results demonstrate that the price–rent ratios in most of the sample cities are no longer non-stationary, implying the non-existence of rational bubbles in the housing markets.

Does Corruption Facilitate Trade for the New EU Members

The paper uses a gravity model to examine the role of corruption in the direction of trade in a data set comprising OECD economies, new EU members and developing nations. Contrary to a number of studies, the findings suggest that membership of the RTAs does not always increase bilateral trade whereas reducing a countrys corruption does tend to increase trade flows. The results suggest that EU membership, with the associated improvement in the perceived level of corruption, should have a positive impact on Romania and Bulgaria.

The Role of Banks in Financial Integration: Some New Theory and Evidence from New EU Members

Over the last two decades, there have been major changes in the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) as their economies collapsed and they undertook the journey from centralised economies to market-based systems. The initial effects of the transformation process involved substantial reductions in output and the need for a complete restructuring of industry.