In this paper we propose a novel way to model the labor market in the context of a New-Keynesian general equilibrium model, incorporating labor market frictions in the form of hiring and firing costs. We show that such a model is able to replicate many important stylized facts of the business...

This paper examines whether policymakers, economists at the Israeli Finance Ministry, act in their personal pension decisions in accordance with the rational behaviour assumptions underlying the pension policies they advance. We find that while economists' decisions regarding three other...

The aim of this paper is to provide some new empirical evidence on the determinants of volatility of real exchange rates in emerging countries, focusing on the role of international financial integration in particular. A reduced-form model is estimated using the GMM method for dynamic panels...

This paper studies the performance of China’s exports during the 2008—2009 financial crisis. It focuses on the speed at which China’s exports were hit by this downturn. Product-country monthly exports data is utilized. It is found that GDP growth rates of importing countries play an...

Globalization is blamed for many socio-economic shortcomings. I discuss the consequences of globalization by surveying the empirical globalization literature. My focus is on the KOF indices of globalization (Dreher 2006a and Dreher et al. 2008a), that have been used in more than 100 studies....

We test the hypothesis that the government bond markets in the Eurozone are more fragile and more susceptible to self-fulfilling liquidity crises than in stand-alone countries. We find evidence that a significant part of the surge in the spreads of the PIGS countries in the Eurozone during...

International trade policy analysis has tended to focus on the production side of general equilibrium, with policies such as a tariff or carbon tax affecting international and internal income distributions through a Heckscher-Ohlin nexus of factor intensities and factor endowments. Here I move...

We analyze the similarities and the differences in the fragility of the European Monetary system (EMS) and the Eurozone. We test the hypothesis that in the EMS the fragility arose from the absence of a credible lender of last resort in the foreign exchange markets while in the Eurozone it was...

“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...

The aim of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the impact of international financial integration on the long-run Real Exchange Rate (RER) in 39 developing countries belonging to three different geographical regions (Latin America, Asia and MENA). It covers the period 1979-2004,...