It is commonly observed that international trade negotiations repeatedly fail to achieve outcomes that would appear to satisfy the criteria of efficiency and mutual advantage. It can be argued that this is due principally to the influence of interest groups. This paper develops an analytical...

"Race-to-the-bottom" deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern is...

Lobby groups press for various administrative concessions which are granted at the expense of the rest of society. This paper tries to explain why sometimes the rest of society does not prevent the lobbies from exploiting them while at other times it protests against the injustice. It also...

It has been argued in the literature that interjurisdictional competition forces the public sector to increase its efficiency and thus helps to tame Leviathan governments. The paper addresses this hypothesis by means of a simple tax-competition model with a Leviathan state. It is seen that the...

Business cycles reflect changes over time in the amount of trade between individuals. In this paper we show that incorporating explicitly intra-temporal gains from trade between individuals into a macroeconomic model can provide new insight into the potential mechanisms driving economic...

This paper develops a theory characterizing the effects of fiscal policy on unemployment over the business cycle. The theory is based on a model of equilibrium unemployment in which jobs are rationed in recessions. Fiscal policy in the form of government spending on public-sector jobs reduces...

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

This paper uses aggregate Japanese data and sectoral US data to explore the properties of the joint behaviour of stock prices and total factor productivity (TFP) with the aim of highlighting data patterns that are useful for evaluating business cycle theories. The approach used follows that...

The objective of this paper is to provide, in the context of a dynamic general equilibrium model, an answer to the following five questions: 1) To what extent does an economy subject to regular variations in labour productivity growth differ from one where labour productivity is constant? 2)...