This paper examines the resource curse and its transmission channels by resource type. We review and synthesize existing theories of the transmission channels of the curse. This synthesis suggests that (1) relating the transmission channels to the characteristics of different types of resources,...

The author shows with pooled OLS estimations based on transport margins from international social accounting data that investments in improved road infrastructure have the potential to significantly reduce transport costs. However, this result can only be clearly confirmed for industrial...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

We study the design of optimal monetary policy (Ramsey policies) in a model with sticky prices and unionized labour markets. Collective wage bargaining and unions monopoly power tend to dampen wage fluctuations and to amplify employment fluctuations relatively to a DNK model with walrasian...

The currency crises of the 1990s all exhibit a divergence of the nominal and the real exchange rate together with an increase in the negative current account. The nominal rate does not reflect inflation differences fully and the ensuing real appreciation leads to a negative current account. This...

How can we explain the observed behavior of aggregate inflation in response to e.g. monetary policy changes? Mankiw and Reis (2002) have proposed sticky information as an alternative to Calvo sticky prices in order to model the conventional view that i) inflation reacts with delay and gradually...

This paper proposes an approach for estimating the uncertainty associated with model-based macroeconomic forecasts. We argue that estimated forecast intervals should account for the uncertainty arising from selecting the specification of an empirical forecasting model from the sample data. To...

Germany has had an extremely low growth performance since 1995. The paper looks at the long-run reasons for this loss of economic dynamics besides German unification: These include leaving labor idle, a declining share of investment in GDP, a weaker innovative activity, an ineffective system for...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

We suggest a new way to quantify the growth effects of capital mobility. We find that for reasonable parameter values, capital mobility has a large impact on income growth.