This Paper introduces Heckscher-Ohlin trade features into a two-country DSGE model, and studies how productivity shocks propagate through trade in goods. In comparison with standard models, the business cycle properties of our framework are broadly compatible with the empirical evidence....

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

International product market integration enhances both export possibilities through easier access to foreign markets, but also the import threat arising from foreign firms penetrating into the domestic market. These mechanisms affect wage formation and employment creation through many channels...

International integration strengthening intra-industrial trade may have important implications for employment, wages and inequality. The reason is that product market integration enhances export possibilities through easier access to foreign markets, but also import threats arising from foreign...

Similarities between the Great Depression and the Great Recession are documented with respect to the behavior of financial markets. A Great Depression regime is identified by using a Markov-switching VAR. The probability of this regime has remained close to zero for many decades, but spiked for...

Motivated the European debt crisis, we construct a tractable theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms under limited commitment. The government of a sovereign country which has fallen into a recession of an uncertain duration issues one-period debt and can renege on its obligations by...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers’ reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

Several papers that make forecasts about the long-term impact of the current financial crisis rely on models in which there is only one type of financial crisis. These models tend to predict that the current crisis will have long lasting negative effects on economic growth. This paper points out...

Standard accounts of the Great Depression attribute an important causal role to monetary policy errors in accounting for the catastrophic collapse in economic activity observed in the early 1930s. While views vary on the relative importance of money versus credit contraction in the propagation...