We examine the impact of a stylized pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) Social Security program in an economy of overlapping generations with equilibrium growth. We adopt realistic mortality and other demographic assumptions and allow for the presence or absence of full life annuities. In all cases we find...

This paper shows that for five small commodity-exporting countries that have adopted inflation targeting monetary policies, world commodity price aggregates have predictive power for their CPI and PPI inflation, particularly once possible structural breaks are taken into account. This conclusion...

The literature on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) determinants is remarkably diverse in terms of competing theories and empirical results. We utilize Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to resolve the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing FDI theories. Since the structure of...

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have been identified as key drivers of economic performance in R&D based growth models, but their impact on development has not been fully explored in development accounting exercises. We introduce IPRs to the development accounting literature, using Two-Stage...

A generalized measure of the excess burden of a tax system is proposed which integrates the distribution of taxes, along with standard efficiency and compliance costs, as a source of excess burden. In the absence of compliance and efficiency costs, the generalized excess burden measures the...

Documenting the long term impact of institutions on economic performance has generated tremendous interest in the development literature. Contemporary or intermediate term effects of institutions over time are difficult to establish, however, since institutions seldom change significantly in the...