Russia's regions are heavily exposed to regional income shocks because of an uneven distribution of natural resources and a Soviet legacy of heavily skewed regional specialization. Also, Russia has a limited mobility of labour and lacks fiscal instruments to deal with regional shocks. We assess...

This paper provides an explanation of the simultaneous occurrence in developing countries of a large accumulation of external debt, private capital outflows and relatively low domestic capital formation. We consider a general equilibrium model in which two types of government with conflicting...

This paper investigates the informal labour market in Russia in late 1995 and estimates a labour supply function in the informal sector using nationally representative micro-data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, Round VI. The findings show that the informal economy constitutes a...

Emigration of labour and its subsequent repatriation can best be understood as phases of an intertemporal exchange process, of a relatively abundant factor, namely unskilled labour, for a relatively scarce factor, namely capital. This capital flow initially consists of financial capital, that is...

Using a human-capital-based growth model, we show the essential role of labour mobility and cross-country tax harmonization in equalizing income levels of countries that start off from different initial income positions. Knowledge spillovers cum labour mobility are the driving forces behind the...

In Spring 1991, we argued that the centrepiece of German policy towards unification should be a universal, temporary wage subsidy in Eastern Germany and the elimination of all other subsidies. Subsequent events have strengthened the analytical case for and practical importance of this policy....

A model of the labour market under firing restrictions and endogenous quits is constructed. It is shown that in the spirit of Blanchard and Summers (1988), the model can generate multiple equilibria, with a low-quits/high-unemployment equilibrium coexisting with a high-quits/low-unemployment...

The paper analyses complementarities among a variety of labour market policies. It shows: (a) that a wide range of labour market institutions (e.g. unemployment benefits, job security legislation and payroll taxes) have complementary effects on unemployment; and thus (b) that policies aimed at...

This paper assesses the relevance of the exchange rate regime for stabilization policy. This regime question cannot be dealt with independently of other institutions, in particular how fiscal policy is designed. We show that once fiscal policy is taken into account, the exchange rate regime is...