This paper explores the role of pooled-producer, e.g. private label, trade intermediation in shaping the range and diversity of exports. Direct sales maintain a firm's unique product characteristics (`brand equity'), whereas trade through an intermediary can take two forms — either a...

This paper evaluates the implications for employment, productivity and wages of allowing for more flexibility in weekly hours worked introduced in the recent Spanish labour market reform (the 2012 reform). A crucial aspect of the model will be the extent to which firms will be able to choose the...

This paper analyzes if unemployment can be reduced through labor tax cuts that are financed in a revenue neutral way through energy tax increases. In contrast to other papers on this topic we consider investment behavior of firms in energy saving technologies, irreversibilities, embodied...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

This paper asks why modern finance theory and the efficient market hypothesis have failed to explain long-term carry trades; persistent asset bubbles or zero lower bounds; and financial crises. It extends Keen (Solving the Paradox of Monetary Profits, 2010) and the Theory of the Monetary Circuit...

This paper investigates social mobility in Bolivia and discusses its implications for poverty reduction and long-run growth. Regressions based on household survey data show that social mobility is very low in Bolivia, even by Latin American standards. This is mainly caused by an inadequate...