We explore endogenous monetary unification in the context of a model in which a country with serious structural distortions (and, hence, high inflation) is admitted into a monetary union once its economic structure has converged sufficiently towards that of the existing participants. If...

Recently, Svensson (1997) has shown that a combination of state-contingent inflation targeting and central banker conservatism produces optimal monetary policy if employment is persistent. We argue that the state-contingent nature of the scheme may undermine its credibility. We then show that...

We explore how members of a collective pension scheme can share inflation risks in the absence of suitable financial market instruments. Using intergenerational risk sharing arrangements, risks can be allocated better across the various participants of a collective pension scheme than would be...

We explore endogenous monetary unification in the context of a model in which a country with serious structural distortions (and, hence, high inflation) is admitted into a monetary union once its economic structure has converged sufficiently towards that of the existing participants. If...

The political distortions in public investment projects are investigated within the context of a bipartisan political economy framework. The role of scrapping and modifying projects of previous governments receives special attention. The party in government has an incentive to overspend on large...

The political distortions in public investment projects are investigated within a bipartisan framework. The role of scrapping and modifying projects of previous governments receives special attention. The ruling party overspends on large ideological public investment projects and accumulates too...

This paper presents suggestive evidence of income shifting in response to differences in corporate tax rates for a large selection of OECD countries. We use a new method to disentangle the income shifting effects from the effects of tax rates on real activity. Our baseline estimates suggest that...

This note identifies profit shifting in response to cross-country differences in corporate tax rates as a source of productivity mismeasurement. To quantify the magnitude of mismeasurement, the profit-shifting effect is isolated from other possible effects of corporate tax rates changes on real...

Recently, Svensson (1997) has shown that a combination of state-contingent inflation targeting and central banker "conservatism" produces optimal monetary policy if employment is persistent. We argue that the state-contingent nature of the scheme may undermine its credibility. We then show that...