"This paper evaluates to what extent the introduction of firing costs can affect the aggregate dynamics of a neoclassical growth model with hetrogeneous establishments. Similarly to the previous literature, firing costs are found to have large steady- state effcts. However, they have no...

"In his famous 1987 monograph, Robert Lucas argued that further stabilizing the business cycles that persisted in the post-War era was pointless, because these cycles had a negligible effect on societal well- being. In particular, Lucas demonstrated that society should be willing to pay only a...

"Economists have long viewed recessions as contributing to increasing inequality. However, this conclusion is largely based on data from a period in which inequality was increasing over time. This paper examines the connection between long-run trends and cyclical variation in earnings...

"John Law's System was a radical restructuring of French public finances, carried out from 1716 to 1720. It involved on the one hand a conversion of the existing French public debt into something like government equity, on the other hand the replacement of commodity money with fiat money. For...

This paper uses highly detailed, quarterly data for five major industrialized economies to estimate the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1–2010:Q4. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample of data provide evidence of two key relationships....