An increasing number of central banks implement monetary policy via two standing facilities: a lending facility and a deposit facility. In this paper we show that it is socially optimal to implement a non-zero interest rate spread. We prove this result in a dynamic general equilibrium model...

I show in this paper that incomplete contracts affect a firm's decision about serving foreign customers through exports or local sales from an affiliated plant. When contracts between two agents within a firm are too costly to write, the share of multinational firms may be higher or lower...

This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present...

What are the impacts of labor tax reform on wage setting and employment to keep the relative tax burden per low-skilled and high-skilled workers constant in the case of heterogeneous domestic labor markets, i.e. imperfect competition in low-skilled labor and perfect competition in high-skilled...

This paper investigates the conditions under which partial harmonization for capital taxation is sustained in a repeated interactions model of tax competition when there are three heterogenous countries with respect to their capital endowments. We show that regardless of the structure of the...

In the standard setting a system of tradable permits is effective and cost-efficient in attaining the policy objective of pollution reduction. This outcome is challenged in case of a tradable permit system in a federal system/constitution with individual states having discretionary power...

This paper employs a stylized New Keynesian DSGE model for a monetary union to analyze whether cyclical inflation differentials can be explained by cross-country differences concerning the characteristics of financial markets. Our results suggest that empirically plausible degrees of...

I study climate policy choices for a “policy bloc” of fuel-importers, when a “fringe” of other fuel importers have no climate policy, fuel exporters consume no fossil fuels, and importers produce no such fuels. The policy bloc and exporter blocs act strategically in fossil fuel markets....

Scientific expertise suggests that mitigating extreme world-wide climate change damages requires avoiding increases in the world mean temperature exceeding 2° Celsius. To achieve the two degree target, the cumulated global emissions must not exceed some limit, the so-called global carbon...