Egypt needs to diversify exports further in order to emerge from its isolation and to draw the maximum advantage from the growth potential offered by trade globalization. To what extent does the bilateral free trade agreement with the European Union encourage the transition from a rentier...

We evaluate potential costs and benefits of Eastern enlargement of the EU. In addressing fiscal costs of enlargement in addition to tariff and non-tariff barriers, we arrive at important conclusions: 1) Overall, extending EU membership to Eastern applicants is more than worth its price to...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

This paper quantifies the macroeconomic implications of the lack of insurance against idiosyncratic labour market risk. I show that in a model economy calibrated to observed individual level data, households make ample use of work effort as a consumption smoothing mechanism. As a consequence,...

The rise in inequality and poverty is one of the most important economic and social issues in recent times. But in contrast to the literature on individual earnings inequality, there has been little work modelling (as opposed to documenting) household income dynamics. This is largely because of...

This Paper explores the implications of the recent sharp rise in US wage inequality for welfare and the cross-sectional distributions of hours worked, consumption and earnings. From 1967 to 1996 cross-sectional dispersion of earnings increased more than wage dispersion, due to a rise in the...

This Paper analyses the persistence of poverty in Sweden using a hazard rate model based on multiple spells. The model also accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and possibly endogenous initial conditions. We estimate the model on a large representative Swedish panel dataset, LINDA, for the...

Data on the life-cycle profiles of inequality in wages, earnings, hours worked and consumption contains precious information for answering questions about the ability of households to insure labor market risk and about the sources of this risk. This Paper demonstrates that the choice of whether...

This paper presents a computable general equilibrium model of world trade, and applies the model to analyses of world trade and production effects of European integration. The main features of the model are: four world regions, twelve traded goods, one non-tradable aggregate in each region and...

We address the issue of social distribution of an aggregate risk (on agricultural export price), from a macroeconomic perspective. Individual incomes in representative social groups are computed as a function of export prices, which are assumed to be stochastic, using an applied general...