We study monetary policy-making in an economy with many sector-specific monopoly unions. It is assumed that the senior union members are in the majority and – due to the practice of lay-offs by inverse seniority – face a lower unemployment risk than the junior members. Consequently, the...

We study a two–sector version of the neoclassical growth model with coalitions of factor suppliers in the capital producing sectors. We show that if the coalitions have monopoly rights, then they block the adoption of the efficient technology. We also show that blocking leads to a decrease in...

Standard growth accounting exercises find large cross-country differences in aggregate TFP. Here we ask whether specific sectors are driving these differences, and, if this is the case, which these problem sectors are. We argue that to answer these questions we need to consider four sectors. In...

It is well known that if there are mild sector-specific externalities, then the steady state of the standard two-sector real business cycle model can become locally indeterminate and endogenous business cycles can arise. We show that this result is not robust to the introduction of standard...

How does trade policy a affect technology adoption, total factor productivity (TFP henceforth), and per capita income? To study this question we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy in which a coalition of skilled workers chooses the technology. We obtain three...

Models with externalities have become increasingly popular for studying both long-term growth and business-cycle fluctuations. Externalities can lead to indeterminacy, allowing self-fulfilling expectations to determine the equilibrium. This paper argues that the importance of indeterminacy might...

This paper shows that delegation of monetary policy to a weight-conservative central banker is optimal, although the government can also use an inflation contract, an employment target, an inflation target, or any combination of these, to control the central banker. The key feature of our model...

Using the citizen-candidate model, we relate the monetary policy objective to individuals' voting decisions and characterize equilibrium inflation and employment under central bank dependence and independence. We also endogenize the decisions about the labour market distortion and central bank...

Many applications in economics use multi-sector versions of the growth model with Cobb--Douglas production functions at the sector level. In this paper, we measure the U.S. income shares of capital and labour for five sectors that encompass the typical sectors used in the literature. We also...

This paper assesses how structural transformation is affected by sectoral differences in labor-augmenting technological progress, capital intensity, and substitutability between capital and labor. We estimate CES production functions for agriculture, manufacturing, and services on postwar US...