Using a two-sector-two-country model with aggregate scale economies and unionisation, we show that optimal welfare state policy entails positive levels of unemployment benefits under free-trade and capital mobility. In this setting, economic integration does not reduce the revenue raising...

The World Trade Organization, which came into existence at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, is in charge of administering a plethora of new trade rules. The main thrust of the new rules is to reduce or abolish tariffs and quotas on a wide range of products. Some tariffs and quotas were...

The objective of the paper is to answer an often-asked question : if tariff rates are reduced, what will happen to wage inequality ? We consider two types of wage inequality : between occupations (skills premium), and between industries. We use two large data bases of wage inequality that have...

The objective of the paper is to answer an often-asked question : if tariff rates are reduced, what will happen to wage inequality ? We consider two types of wage inequality : between occupations (skills premium), and between industries. We use two large data bases of wage inequality that have...

Recent research on the unobserved economy suggests that the phenomenon has important implications for both macroeconomic policy and public finance. Attention is focused on the public finance implications by examining a macro-model model from which it is possible to derive a family of Laffer...

This paper studies the structure and time consistency of optimal monetary policy from a public finance perspective in an economy where agents differ in preference for liquidity and holdings of nominal assets. I find that the presence of distributional effects breaks the link between time...

Pro Poor Growth has become a central concern to achieve sustainable poverty reduction in developing countries. Despite being widely used, the term is not well-defined nor has there been a clear policy document that would summarize the determinants and policy implications of pro poor growth. This...

Hall (1978) theorized that future consumption could be written only as a function of its current consumption. Since this result is known to be wrong in data, we reexamine, from Flavin's original equations (1981), how they may have reached this conclusion. In the Appendix, we derive a generic...

Compared to its central role in policy discussions in the United States and most other developed countries, the reliability of the measurement of the output gap has attracted relatively little academic study. Furthermore, both the academic literature and the debate among practitioners have...