The distributional effects of the minimum wage are analysed in a model where skilled and unskilled labour enter the production function. It is argued that distributional goals are best achieved by letting the labour market clear and achieving redistribution through taxes and transfers.

Gender-based discrimination is a pervasive and costly phenomenon. To a greater or lesser extent, all economies present a gender wage gap, associated with lower female labour force participation rates and higher fertility. This paper presents a growth model where saving, fertility and labour...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of technological adoption in an economy populated by 'satisficing' entrepreneurs whose main objective is to minimise innovative effort while keeping the firm alive. In such an economy, product market competition is shown to have a stimulating...

A representative agent who is employed chooses an optimal degree of wage indexation (to prices and the auction wage) in response to the monetary regime. Should that regime target the growth rate or the level of the money supply, or of prices (as in a commodity standard)? We find that, contrary...

We study the impact of regional and sectoral productivity changes on the U.S. economy. To that end, we consider an environment that captures the effects of interregional and intersectoral trade in propagating disaggregated productivity changes at the level of a sector in a given U.S. state to...

This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing; a government policy that is designed to mitigate risk through central bank purchases of privately held risky assets and their replacement by government debt, with a return that is guaranteed by the taxpayer. Policies of this kind have...

We estimate an aggregate production function with constant elasticity of substitution between energy and a capital/labor composite using U.S. data. The implied measure of energy-saving technical change appears to respond strongly to the oil-price shocks in the 1970s and has a negative medium-run...

We document a sharp reversal in electoral participation between the North and the South of Italy after the 1912 enfranchisement which extended voting rights from a limited élite to (almost) all adult males. When voting was restricted to the élite, electoral turnout was higher in the South but...

We study the mechanisms through which the adoption of the Euro delayed, rather than advanced, economic reforms in the Euro zone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in these countries. We show that the abandonment of the reform process and the institutional...

Eleven percent of the Malawian population is HIV infected. Eighteen percent of sexual encounters are casual. A condom is used one quarter of the time. A choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model is constructed to analyze the Malawian epidemic. In the developed framework, people select...