In their famous paper on the "Big Push", Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in this...

We propose new methods to identify the full impact of country-specific characteristics on bilateral trade flows within the framework of ‘the new quantitative trade model.' We complement theory with a simple two-stage estimating procedure, and offer a proof of concept by quantifying the impact...

Motivated by the European Union's debate on sanctioning crude oil imports from Russia, we estimate the elasticity of substitution between different crude oil types. Using European data on country-level crude oil imports by field of origin, we argue that crude oil is not a homogenous good and...

We build a general equilibrium model of endogenous communication, quality control and trade. We derive a structural gravity equation from the model and show that exogenous communication costs raise the costs of quality control and have a larger impact on products with a lower elasticity of...

The paper studies the determinants of income distribution and growth in an overlapping generations economy with heterogenous households. Our framework has the following main features: (1) heterogeneity of consumers with respect to wealth and parental human capital; (2) intergenerational...

The macroeconomic effects on growth, investment and private sector employment of different ways of rolling back the welfare state are analysed. Cutting public spending on private goods induces a lower interest rate, a higher wage, a lower capital stock and a fall in employment. Cutting public...

What is an optimal or a sustainable external debt - for a country, region or sector? How should one monitor and evaluate debt to preclude a crisis? We use stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt. The deviation of the actual from the optimal will serve as a...

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and economic growth/fluctuations. The set-up is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of growth and endogenously chosen fiscal policy, in which two political parties can alternate in power. The party in office chooses...

The residence-based taxation of interest income in the EU faces the difficulty that taxpayers may evade taxation by holding bank accounts in other countries. The EU therefore makes considerable efforts to achieve cooperation among EU member states in order to improve tax enforcement. The present...

This paper develops a simple framework to analyze the links between corruption and the unofficial economy and their implications for the official economy. In a model of self-selection with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, we show that the entrepreneurs option to flee to the underground economy...