[Examines the Soviet employee's right to his existing job, unless he deliberately misbehaves or voluntarily quits to search for another, and the maintenance of overfull employment in all regional labor markets of the Soviet Union. It is hypothesized that the preservation of the above conditions is the main objective of Soviet central planners. Describes the characteristics of the Soviet labor market and discusses overfull employment and job rights. Presents a maximization model for testing the hypothesis, fixed prices, fixed investment, education, and the labor market. Discusses applications, focusing on the supply side of the second economy, inventories as an employment buffer, and primary and secondary labor markets. Granick is Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Bibliography; index.]

[Like most Western European countries, Germany stringently regulates dismissals and layoffs. Critics contend that this regulation raises the costs of employment adjustment and hence impedes employers' ability to respond to fluctuations in demand. Other German labor policies, however, most especially the availability of unemployment insurance benefits for those on short time, facilitate the adjustment of average hours per worker in lieu of layoffs. Building on earlier work, we compare the adjustment of employment, hours and inventories to demand shocks in the German and U.S. manufacturing sectors. We find that, in the short run, whereas U.S. employers rely principally on the adjustment of employment levels to respond to demand shocks, German employers rely principally on the adjustment of average hours per worker. The adjustment of overall labor input is generally similar in the two countries. Short-time work makes a very important contribution to short-run hours adjustment in Germany. We find little evidence that inventories help to buffer demand fluctuations in either country. Our findings suggest that, given appropriate supporting institutions, strong worker job security can be compatible with employers' need for flexibility in staffing levels.]

[This paper presents a method to integrate labor hoarding into a disequilibrium model of the labor market. Disequilibrium indicators for the labor market that include labor hoarding are constructed. These indicators, being important determinants of policy multipliers with respect to employment, are found to be less volatile than the corresponding disequilibrium indicators for the goods market which are available from business surveys. The lower volatility reflects the role of labor hoarding as a buffer between actual and efficient employment levels. Our results indicate that labor hoarding in Dutch enterprises ranges from a minimum of 0.5 percent of employment in early 1985 to a maximum of 7.0 percent in 1975. Furthermore, the paper pays special attention to the modeling of mismatch unemployment and to the simulation results of an empirical disequilibrium macromodel of the Dutch economy.]

[This paper analyzes the effect of a variation of the demand for labor on employment and working time. The main characteristic of the model proposed is that employment reacts slowly to variations in the demand for labor, thereby causing working time to act as a buffer which temporarily absorbs the shocks. Such a model is estimated for Italian and U.S. data; comparing the results obtained, it is shown that the dynamics of adjustment to shocks are much slower in Italy than in the U.S.; as a consequence, working time in Italy is much more volatile. The estimation procedure was carried out using a state space approach, which enabled us to distinguish between institutional effects, such as seasonality, and adjustment effects.]

[U.S. monetary and fiscal policy currently utilizes excess capacity, including unemployment, for price stability. This paper analyzes another option--the government as employer of last resort (ELR), eliminating involuntary unemployment. Price stability is maintained by restraining the ELR wage and a fiscal and monetary policy sufficiently restrictive to maintain a credible ELR pool buffer stock. In support, the logic behind Chartalism and post-Keynesian monetary economics is extended, deducing the state as a single supplier of what it demands for tax payment implies both exogenous pricing and exogenous interest rates, and that Treasury securities function as interest rate support, not funding.]