This paper develops a theoretical model to explore the relationship between openness to trade and long-term income inequality. Empirical evidence on the issue is mixed, though greater inequality is often cited as a possible cost of trade liberalization. To quantify the effect of liberalization...

The empirical literature studying the effects of fiscal policy shocks using VAR models differs among two important dimensions: the identification scheme and the VAR specification. Not surprisingly the results obtained are often diverse. The aim of this paper is to test whether differences in the...

Economic fluctuations are much stronger in developing countries than in the United States. Yet, while a large literature debates what constitutes a reasonable estimate of the welfare cost of business cycles in the US, it remains an open question how large that cost is in developing countries....

This paper studies the effects of social insurance policies on the level and distribution of welfare and resources in a general equilibrium model of a closed economy with a continuum of agents and moral hazard. In order to simulate the welfare-state tradeoff between efficiency and equality, I...

We use parametric power ARCH models of the conditional variance of inflation and monthly data in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden for the period 1962-2004 to examine the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty. In two out of the three countries inflation significantly raises...

This paper aims at contributing to the research agenda on the sources of price stickiness, showing that the adoption of nominal price rigidity may be an optimal firms' reaction to the consumers' behavior, even if firms have no adjustment costs. With regular broadly accepted assumptions on...

The money-age distribution is found to be hump-shaped for the US economy. The variation (inequality) of cash holdings within generations increases (declines) with age. Furthermore, cash holdings are found to be only weakly correlated ith both income and wealth. We analyze three motives for money...

Recent empirical work documents substantial disagreement in inflation expectations obtained from survey data. Furthermore, the extent of such disagreement varies systematically over time in a way that reflects the level and variance of current inflation. This paper offers a simple explanation...