This paper is concerned with a policy oriented macroeconomic experiment involving an 'international' economy with a relatively small 'home' country and a large 'foreign' country. It compares the economic performance of two alternative tax systems as a means to finance unemployment benefits: a...

In order to alleviate unemployment it is often recommended to reduce social security contributions (SSC) and to compensate for the ensuing loss in revenues by a rise in the value-added tax (VAT). Assuming unemployment to be caused by efficiency wages, it is shown that a balanced-budget shift...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

A search model of the labor market is augmented to include commuting time to work. The theory posits that wages are positively related to commute distance, by a factor itself depending negatively on the bargaining power of workers. Since not all combinations of distance and wages are accepted,...

"This paper deals with potential instabilities in the Eurozone stemming from an insufficient interplay between monetary policy and reform effort on the one hand and the emergence of intra-Euro area divergences on the other. As a first step, we assess the effect of EMU on structural reform and...

This paper considers a multivariate t version of the Gaussian dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model proposed by Engle (2002), and suggests the use of devolatized returns computed as returns standardized by realized volatilities rather than by GARCH type volatility estimates. The t-DCC...

The main goal of regionalization is the creation of free trade areas and the guarantee for countries to accede to a widened market. Many studies dealing with the effects of regional free trade agreements on trade flows already exist in the economic literature and the explosion in the number of...

This paper analyzes public provision of internationally applicable and country-specific education, when job opportunities available to those with internationally applicable education are uncertain. Migration provides a market insurance in case labor market opportunities in the home country are...

This paper analyzes the effects of different labor market institutions on inflation and output volatility. The eurozone offers an unprecedented experiment for this exercise: since 1999, no national monetary policies have been implemented that could account for volatility differences across...

We analyze the optimal regional pattern of public employment in an information-constrained second-best redistribution policy showing that regionally differentiated public employment can serve as an expenditure side tagging device, bypassing or relaxing the equity-efficiency trade-off. The...