National labour market institutions interact across national boundaries when product markets are global. Labour market policies can thus entail spill-overs, which suggests that there are benefits from international policy coordination. This paper studies the effects of wage subsidies in an...

Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable progress in the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Central banks in developed and emerging market economies have become increasingly interested in their usefulness for policy analysis and...

Non-spherical errors, namely heteroscedasticity, serial correlation and cross-sectional correlation are commonly present within panel data sets. These can cause significant problems for econometric analyses. The FGLS(Parks) estimator has been demonstrated to produce considerable efficiency gains...

In the presence of selection bias, traditional estimators of pseudo panel data are inconsistent. In this paper, the authors derive the conditions under which consistence is achieved in pseudo-panel estimation and propose a simple test of selection bias. Specifically, they propose a Wald test for...

Models in which firms use a rule of thumb or partial indexing in price setting are prominent in the recent monetary policy literature. The extent to which these firms adjust their prices to lagged inflation has been taken as fixed. We consider the implications of firms choosing the optimal...

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that a positive technology shock leads to a temporary decline in employment. A two-country model is used to demonstrate that the open economy dimension can enhance the ability of sticky price models to account for the evidence. The reasoning is as...

Most people accept that structural and labour market reforms are needed in Europe. However few have been undertaken. The usual conjecture is that reforms are costly in economic performance and costly to finance. Blanchard and Giavazzi (2003) and Spector (2004) develop a general equilibrium model...

The most important economic measures are monetary. They have many different names, are derived in different theories and employ different formulas; yet, they all attempt to do basically the same thing : to separate a change in nominal value into a ?real part? due to the changes in quantities and...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption...

Empirical analyses of Cagan?s money demand schedule for hyper-inflation have largely ignored the explosive nature of hyper-inflationary data. It is argued that this contributes to an (i) inability to model the data to the end of the hyper-inflation, and to (ii) discrepancies between ?estimated?...