Discussions of the economic costs and benefits of EMU usually take as their basis the optimum currency area (OCA) approach. This approach starts from the premise that when an external shock hits the economy, it is easier to adjust the exchange rate than domestic prices or wages. Most economists...

This paper compares Mauritius and Trinidad and Tobago which have a very similar climate, history, institutional framework, ethnic composition, size, etc., but are different in the natural resources they possess. Trinidad and Tobago has achieved a higher per capita GDP based on its petrodollars,...

Abstract: We study the relationship between offshoring and job stability in Italy in the period 1995–2001 by using an administrative dataset on manufacturing workers. We find that the international fragmentation of production negatively affects job stability. Service offshoring and material...

Pro-Poor Growth (PPG) is the vision of combining high growth rates with poverty reduction.Due to the myriad of possible determinants of growth and poverty a unique theoretical model for guiding empirical work on PPG is absent, though.Bayesian Model Averaging is a statistically robust framework...

In this paper we develop a formal model of economic growth and two types of social capital. Following extant literature, we model social capital as participation in two types of social networks: first, closed networks of family and friends, and, second, open networks that bridge different...

In the preceding paper we have seen that the top types of labor are relatively scarce in China and this raises the issue of income inequality under competition.Our main finding is that inequality would multiply indeed. Subsidiary, the nature of inequality would shift from the rural-urban divide...

This paper extends the work of Glaeser et al.(1992) by looking at effects of agglomeration economies on employment growth in Dutch city-industries and in very small (postal) zip code-industries in the Dutch province of South-Holland. At both levels of geographic detail, findings are broadly...

Abstract: The European sovereign debt crisis is characterized by the simultaneous surge in borrowing costs in the GIPS countries after 2008. We present a theory, which can account for the behavior of sovereign bond spreads in Southern Europe between 1998 and 2012. Our key theoretical argument is...

We study the dynamic output and welfare effects of public infrastructure investment under a balanced budget fiscal rule, using an overlapping generations model of a small open economy. The government finances public investment by employing distortionary labor taxes. We find a negative short-run...