This paper attempts to document and account for the long run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20%-25% of national income between 1820 and 1910, down to less than 5% in 1950, and back up to about 15% by 2010. A simple...

Feedback mechanisms are the key to sequencing when it comes to regional integration. Feedback mechanisms can mean that today’s policy or institution alters the political economy landscape in a way that makes it politically optimal for future governments to take further steps towards...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

The objective of this research is to document and to explain trends in inequality in 20th century France. Data from income tax returns (1915-98), wage tax returns (1919-98) and inheritance tax returns (1902-94), is used in order to compute fully homogeneous, yearly estimates of income...

This paper explores the two common concepts of the natural rate of unemployment: (i) the stable, long-run equilibrium rate of unemployment; and (ii) the equilibrium unemployment rate at which there is no tendency for this rate to change, given the exogenous variables. The first concept (common...

This paper considers the effects of monetary and fiscal policies in an optimizing model with capital accumulation and finite lives. An increase in monetary growth is no longer superneutral in a money-capital economy, but leads to a reduction in the real interest rate and increases in the capital...

Assuming that economic reforms are successful in Eastern Europe, what will be the effects on Western Europe? The focus is on the wage pressure that the threat of migration from East to West is likely to impose. The paper adopts a Ramsey model of intertemporal choice, for both individuals and...

It is shown that, when there is a genuine long-run trade-off between inflation and output, coordination under pre-commitment yields substantial improvements in economic welfare. The analysis is conducted within the context of a two-country model with capital accumulation, immobile labour,...

This paper considers alternative modes of stabilization of world-wide and relative levels of public debt. The analysis is in terms of a model of overlapping, infinitely lived households. Three methods are compared: tax finance, public- consumption finance and monetary finance. We show that a...

Despite the liberalization of capital flows among OECD countries, equity home bias remains sizable. We depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias: transaction costs that impede international diversification, and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk...