OPTIMThe conservative central banker has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

A trade union whose purpose is to raise wages above the competitive level may foster economic growth if it succeeds in shifting income away from the owners of capital to the workers and if the workers' marginal propensity to save exceeds the one of capitalists. We make this point in an...

Labor unions' greatest potential for political influence likely arises from their direct connection to millions of individuals at the workplace. There, they may change the ideological positions of both unionizing workers and their non-unionizing management. In this paper, we analyze the...

We analyze union behavior in a model with membership dynamics and compare the labor market outcomes to static union models. Based on empirical findings we modify standard models and show that the well-known result that static models overstate distortions caused by unions only holds in the...

Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for firms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A...

To what extent do countries' corporate income tax (CIT) rates attract foreign tax bases? What are the revenue implications of a unilateral tax reduction when tax bases are internationally mobile? These questions are explored using a panel of annual data from 17 OECD countries spanning the period...

We construct a panel of satisfaction with democracy (SWD) and economic, institutional, and environmental variables for 1990-2001 for fifteen European countries. In this sample, controlling for a number of factors, we find that average SWD is higher where (1) there exists an energy / CO2 tax,...

A unique dataset is used to separately analyze the social origins of left-wing and nationalist-separatist terrorism in 17 Western European countries between 1970 and 2007. We argue that the differences in the historic roots, ultimate goals as well as their negotiability, levels of domestic and...

A large body of literature finds that exporters do not pass nominal exchange rate movements fully through to destination market prices over short time horizons. This imperfect passthrough has been widely attributed to strategic pricing-to-market , whereby exporters deliberately accept changes in...

To explain the rise in the college wage premium in developed economies in the past decades, the present paper examines the effects of technological progress on workers effort incentives, which determine the effective labor supply. Five effort incentive effects of technological progress are...