The European Union has recently proposed sectoral tax differentiation as a policy to fight unemployment. The member countries are allowed to reduce the VAT rates on goods and services that are particularly labor intensive and price elastic. The paper provides a theoretical analysis of the...

This paper employs a general equilibrium model of imperfect competition and trade in which capital is used to establish firms and labor is used for production. We show that two different types of equilibria may exist, one with factor price equalization and one with different factor prices. When...

In this paper we develop a general model of an imperfectly competitive small open economy. There is a traded and non-traded sector, whose outputs are combined in order to produce a single final good that can be either consumed or invested. We make general assumptions about preferences and...

This short paper reconsiders the popular result that the lower the probability of getting reelected, the stronger the incumbent politicians incentive to follow short-sighted, inefficient policies. The set-up is a general equilibrium model of endogenous growth and optimal fiscal policy, in which...

Low-skilled immigrants indirectly affect public finances through their effect on native wages & labor supply. We operationalize this general-equilibrium effect in the workhorse labor market model with heterogeneous workers and intensive and extensive labor supply margins. We derive a closed-form...

This paper incorporates an uncoordinated struggle for extra fiscal favors into an otherwise standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model. This reflects the popular belief that interest groups compete for privileged transfers and tax treatment at the expense of the general public...

We assess the role of national fiscal policies, as automatic stabilizers, within a monetary union. We use a two-country New Keynesian DGE model which incorporates non-Ricardian consumers (as in Galì et al. 2004) and a home bias in the composition of national consumption bundles. We find that...

The argument that policy risk, i.e., uncertainty about monetary and fiscal policy, has been holding back the economic recovery in the U.S. during the Great Recession has a large popular appeal. We analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New...

This paper searches for a general equilibrium model of optimal growth and endogenous fiscal policy with the aim of explaining the interaction between private agents and fiscal authorities in the U.S., West Germany, Japan and the U.K. over the period 1960-1996. Our search is conducted in the...

We analyze whether different learning abilities of firms with respect to general equilibrium effects lead to different levels of unemployment. We consider a general equilibrium model where firms in one sector compete à la Cournot and a real wage rigidity leads to unemployment. If firms consider...