This paper reviews two recent books on Political Economy by Allan Drazen and Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini. It discusses some problems of the recent Political Economy literature.

We analyze how unemployment, job finding and job separation rates react to neutral and investment-specific technology shocks. Neutral shocks increase unemployment and explain a substantial portion of it volatility; investment-specific shocks expand employment and hours worked and contribute to...

Why do people coordinate on the use of valueless pieces of paper as generally accepted money? A possible answer is that these objects have intrinsic properties that make them better candidates to be used as media of exchange. Another answer stresses the fact that unconvertible fiat money will...

Payoff heterogeneity weakens positive feedback in binary choice models in two ways. First, heterogeneity drives individuals to corners where they are unaffected by strategic complementarities. Second, aggregate behaviour is smoother than individual behaviour when individuals are heterogeneous....

We analyze the effects of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks on hours and output. Long cycles in hours are captured in a variety of ways. Hours robustly fall in response to neutral shocks and robustly increase in response to investment specific shocks. The percentage of the...

We investigate the impact of 20th--century European colonization on growth in Africa. We find that in the 1960--88 period growth has been faster for dependencies than for colonies; for British and French colonies than for Portuguese, Belgian and Italian ones; and for countries with less economic...

Models of the exchange process based on search theory can be used to analyze the features of objects that make them more or less likely to emerge as ``money'' in equilibrium. These models illustrate the trade--off between endogenous acceptability (an equilibrium property) and intrinsic...

This paper generalizes the original random matching model of money by Kiyotaki and Wright (1989) (KW) in two aspects: first, the economy is characterized by an arbitrary distribution of agents who specialize in producing a particular consumption good; and second, these agents have preferences...

We analyze the labor market effects of neutral and investment-specific technology shocks along the intensive margin (hours worked) and the extensive margin (unemployment). We characterize the dynamic response of unemployment in terms of the job separation and the job finding rate. Labor market...

This paper studies empirical facts regarding the effects of unexpected changes in aggregate macroeconomic fiscal policies on consumers that are allowed to differ depending on their individual characteristics. We use data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate individual-level...