We analyse the question of optimal taxation in a dual economy, when the government is concerned about the distribution of labour income. Income inequality is caused by the presence of sunk capital investments, which creates a good jobs sector due to the capture of quasi-rents by trade unions. We...

This paper examines the responses of private consumption, residential investment, and business investment in 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings...

Building on a new data set which is combined from national micro-data bases, we highlight differences in the structure of migrants to four countries, viz. France, Germany, the UK and the US, which receive a substantial share of all immigrants to the OECD world. Looking at immigrants by source...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic literature. While much is known about 19th century black legal and material conditions, less is known about how 19th century biological conditions were related to the physical environment and...

This paper uses a gravity framework to investigate the effects of distance as well as subnational and national borders in knowledge spillovers. Drawing on the NBER Patent Citations Database, we examine patent citations data at metropolitan level within the U.S. and the 38 largest patent-cited...

This paper contributes to the on-going empirical debate regarding the role of the RBC model and in particular of technology shocks in explaining aggregate fluctuations. To this end we estimate the model's posterior density using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods. Within this framework we...

This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...