This manual provides practical guidance on driving and caring for your Saab. The Saab 9-3 is available with a 2.0l turbo-engine, 185 hp or 205 hp or a 2.3l turbo-engine, 230 hp. Although the manual describes the most important differences between model variants, it does not include precise specifications of the different variants. Some differences also occur to meet special legal requirements in different countries. Importation and distribution of Saab automobiles, spare parts and accessories are handled exclusively by General Motors of Canada Limited in Canada and by Saab Cars USA, Inc. in the U.S.A.
Human capital increases through training, be that implicit on-the-job training (as captured by tenure), or explicit classroom-type formal training leading to human capital accumulation. Our focus in this paper is mostly on the latter: we are interested in how a firm’s explicit decision to train depends on aggregate and sectoral output fluctuations.
It is not ex-ante obvious whether investments in human capital are counter cyclical, pro-cyclical, or a-cyclical. Since the opportunity cost to train workers is lower in downturns, a negative productivity shock should be associated with increased training. This channel is highlighted by deJong and Ingram (2001) who find that training activities “are distinctively countercyclical” and by Devereux (2000) who argues that during downturns firms hoard labor by assigning high-skill workers to lower-production activities such as training, thus avoiding layoffs and the fixed costs associated with firing and re-hiring workers. On the worker side, the literature documents that college enrollment is counter-cyclical (e.g. Dellas and Sakellaris (2003)); typically, enrollment in universities increases when the economy is not doing well and good jobs are harder to find.
The financial crisis starting in the US subprime sector, has spread world wide as a great recession. A hyperactive monetary and fiscal policy since the end of 2007 has aimed at preventing a further financial meltdown in the advanced countries. Some observers meanwhile maintain that a slow recovery appears to be on the horizon. It is still worthwhile however to explore the fragility and potentially destabilizing feedbacks of advanced macroeconomies, in particular in the context of a Keynesian disequilibrium model where such issues have rarely been treated so far.
As the history of macroeconomic dynamics and business cycles – which recently have been developed as boom - bust cycles – has taught us, fragilities and destabilizing feed backs are known to be potential features of all markets – the product markets, the labor market, and the financial markets. In this paper we will focus on the financial market. We use a Tobin-like macroeconomic portfolio approach, coupled with the interaction of heterogeneous agents on the financial market, to characterize the potential for financial market instability.
