The interest rate is generally considered as an important driver of macroeconomic investment. As an innovation, this paper derives the exact shape of the "hysteretic" impact of changes in the interest rate on macroeconomic investment under the scenarios of both certainty and uncertainty. We...

In this paper we study how promoting product market competition by reducing mark-ups or by increasing productivity are able to complement labor market reforms. We use a simple general equilibrium model with different types of labor. The bottom-line of the paper is that product market reforms...

For more than two decades now, current-account imbalances are a crucial issue in the international policy debate as they threaten the stability of the world economy. More recently, the government debt crisis of the European Union shows that internal current account imbalances inside a currency...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others' trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product market...

We examine wage-bargaining in a two-sector economy when employers and labor unions in each sector are not always aware of all general equilibrium feedback effects. We show analytically that if agents only consider labor demand effects, low real wages and low unemployment result. With an...

This paper investigates how families make decisions about the education of juveniles. The decision problem is analyzed in three variations: a 'decentralized' scheme, in which the parents control the purse-strings, but the children dispose of their time as they see fit; a 'hierarchical' scheme,...