This paper analyzes the structural relationship between policies that distort resource allocation and long-ten growth. It first reviews briefly the Solow model in which steady-state growth depends only on exogenous technological change. Policy distortions do affect the rate of growth in the...

Federal governance matters. Policy coordination allows the economic union to exercise monopsony power over migrants. Therefore the migration volumes under the policy-competition regime exceed those under the policy-coordination regime. With loose federal governance, competition over low-skilled...

Many of the most pernicious economic institutions and policies create entry barriers or manipulate factor prices to transfer resources from entrepreneurs and workers to groups that hold political power. These inefficiencies partly result from the fact that direct and efficient fiscal instruments...

Following the rationale for regional redistribution programs described in the official documents of the European Union, this paper studies a very simple multi-country model built around two regions: a core and a periphery. Technological spill-overs link firms' productivity in each of the two...

Both the U.S. and the EU are an economic union: There is a single market for goods, capital, finance, and labor. That is, there is free mobility of goods and services, physical and financial capital, and labor among the member countries of the union. Nevertheless, there is much higher degree of...

Education and income are strong predictors of health and longevity. In the last 20 years many efforts have been made to understand if these relationships are causal and what the possible role of policy should be as a result. The evidence from various studies is ambiguous: the effects of...

We ask: what are the most efficient means of redistribution in an unequal society? We answer this question by characterizing the optimal shape of non-linear income and wealth taxes in a dynamic general equilibrium model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk. Our analysis reproduces the...

We analyze the conduct of fiscal policy in a financially integrated union in the presence of financial frictions. Frictions create a wedge between the return to investment and the union interest rate. This leads to an over-spending externality. While the social cost of spending is the return to...