During the last three decades the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period international capital markets have been liberalized. In this paper we develop a two-country political economy model with incomplete markets and endogenous government...

Standard real business cycle theory predicts that consumption should be smoother than output, as observed in developed coun- tries. In this paper we provide a novel explanation of the consumption volatility puzzle based on political factors. In our model groups that disagree on the size of...

This paper analyzes a business cycle model with labor market frictions as well as an extensive labor supply margin. There are exogenous aggregate shocks to productivity, the job finding rate, and the separation rate. Workers also face idiosyncratic productivity (wage) shocks that they cannot...

Recent research has been able to measure two forms of technical change---one (fossil) energy-saving and one saving on capital/labor. The results first show strong evidence for "directed technical change" in the sense that the total resources devoted to saving on the inputs responds endogenously...

This paper builds a theory of the shape of the distribution of total-factor productiv- ity (TFP) across countries. The data on productivity suggests vast differences across countries, and arguably even has "twin peaks". The theory proposed here is consistent with vast differences in long-run...

We model a labor market with search and matching frictions where some or all workers belong to a (centralized) union, both in the case where coverage is exogenously given and where it is endogenous. Unions are assumed to choose identical wages for all unionized workers, and firms are assumed not...