The data across time and countries suggest that moderate-to-high inflation and inflation volatility are highly correlated. This paper examines the effect of trend inflation on the ability of the monetary authority to ensure a determinate equilibrium and macroeconomic stability in a sticky-price...

The paper studies the equilibrium size of countries. Individuals in small countries have greater influence over the nature of political decision making while individuals in large countries have the advantage of more public goods and lower tax rates. The model implies that (i) there exists...

The state of Michigan radically altered its school finance system in 1994. This was a legislature-led reform that took place somewhat unexpectedly and without the intervention of any courts. The new plan, called Proposal A, significantly increased the state share of K-12 spending and entailed...

In a federation, where different levels of government tax the same base, one can observe two types of externalities: a horizontal externality, working among jurisdictions of the same hierarchical level and leading to tax rates that are suboptimally low; and a vertical externality, working...

If firm sizes have a small dispersion, microeconomic shocks lead to negligible aggregate fluctuations. This has led economists to appeal to macroeconomic (sectoral or aggregate shocks) shocks to explain aggregate fluctuations. However, the empirical distribution of firms is fat-tailed. This...

Empirical evidences tell us that in the recent years the expansion period is increased with reduction of the contraction period in the U.S. business cycles. Moreover, the business cycles in the United States also show the trend to be moderated with recent economic growth induced and supported by...

This paper proposes a new empirical representation of US inflation expectations in a Stace-Space Markov-Switching framework in order to identify the expectations regimes which are associated with short and long term Phillips curves. Results suggest that the dynamics of in‡ation expectation...

Standard theory of small open economies predicts a smooth path for consumption and investment over time, and procyclical current account balances and employment. This contrasts with the data for emerging countries, where consumption, investment and employment are highly procyclical and volatile,...

The paper examines the processes underlying economic fluctuations by investigating the volatility moderation of U.S. economy in the early 1980's. We decompose the volatility decline using a dynamic factor framework into a common stochastic trend, common transitory component and idiosyncratic...

I examine the statistical model of permanent and transitory shocks to output under the following structural assumptions: An aggregate supply shock that raises output will cause the price level to fall and an aggregate demand shock that initially raises output will cause the price level to rise....