Specific quasi-rents build up in a wide variety of economic relationships, and are exposed to opportunism unless fully protected by contract. The recognition that such contracts are often incomplete has yielded major insights into the organization of microeconomic exchange. Rent appropriation,...

We present evidence that noisy financial flows influence financial conditions and macroeconomic activity. How should monetary policy respond to this noise? We develop a model where it is optimal for the central bank to target and (partially) stabilize financial conditions beyond their direct...

The paper develops a model of foreign direct investments (FDI) and foreign portfolio investments (FPI). FDI is characterized by hands-on management style which enables the owner to obtain relatively refined information about the productivity of the firm. This superiority, relative to FPI, comes...

An income tax is generally levied on both capital and labor income. The working young bears mostly the burden of the tax on labor income, whereas the retired old, who already acummulated her savings, bears the brunt of the capital income tax. Therefore, there arise two types of conflict in the...

The note analyzes how globalization forces induce monetary authorities, guided in their policies by the welfare criterion of a representative household, to put greater emphasis on reducing the inflation rate than on narrowing the output gaps

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face, is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...

Migration of young workers (as distinct from retirees), even when driven in by the generosity of the welfare state, slows down the trend of increasing dependency ratio. But, even though low-skill migration improves the dependency ratio, it nevertheless burdens the welfare state. Recent studies...

The behavior of taxes on capital income in the recent decades points to the notion that international tax competition that follows globalization of capital markets put strong downward pressures on the taxation of capital income; a race to the bottom. This behavior has been perhaps most pronounced...

Most economists and observers place the lack of fiscal discipline at the core of the recent Argentine crisis. This begs the question of how countries like Belgium or Italy (pre-Maastricht) could run large fiscal deficits and accumulate debts far beyond those of Argentina, without experiencing...