Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these...

We study the optimal monetary policy in a two-country open-economy model under two monetary arrangements: (a) multiple currencies controlled by independent policy-makers; (b) common currencies controlled by a centralized policy-maker. Our findings suggest that: (i) Monetary policy competition...

We introduce mild increasing returns to scale into a version of the Real Business Cycle model. These increasing returns to scale occur as a consequence of sector-specific externalities, that is, externalities where the output of the consumption and investment sectors have external effects on the...

This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural VAR are truly structural? Second, can the problem of non-fundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first question is 'yes' and...

Since the seminal papers of Kydland and Prescott (1982) and King, Plosser and Rebelo (1988), it has become commonplace in macroeconomics to approximate the solution to nonlinear, dynamic general equilibrium models using linear methods. Linear approximation methods are useful to characterize...

Robust sign restrictions derived from calibrated DSGE models are used to identify structual shocks in the actual data. The dynamic behaviour of selected variables in response to these shocks is employed to measure, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the economic discrepancy between the model...

While empirical evidence finds only a weak relationship between nominal exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute exchange rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, however, appear to change over time and one variable...

This Paper uses individual-level data to characterize economy-wide job creation and destruction during periods of massive structural adjustment. We contrast the gradualist Czech and the rapid Estonian approach to the destruction of the communist economy to provide evidence on selected...

Official adjustments of the budget balance to the cycle merely assume that the only category of government spending that responds automatically to the cycle is unemployment compensation. But estimates show otherwise. Payments for pensions, health, subsistence, invalidity, childcare and subsidies...

The tendency of a single world market to privilege the translation of English fiction and poetry into other languages for reading or listening enjoyment may damage the production of world literature and in this respect make us all worse off. In order to develop this thesis, the article begins...