Social pacts, while improving macroeconomic performance, usually impose costs on unions. To facilitate the formation of such pacts, various substitutes can operate, such as the payment of transfers or, to some extent, the conservativeness of the government, union’s inflation aversion or...

This paper studies corporatism as the outcome of bargaining between the government and a representative labor union. We show that if negotiations between these two parties only relate to macroeconomic stabilization, corporatism can never be beneficial to both parties. As corporatist policies are...

It is now a few years since the introduction of the common currency, and Europe is still experiencing high unemployment. The conventional logic attributes this problem to strong trade unions and other flaws in the labour market. This article takes a different approach. Using a game theoretic...

The massive stocks of foreign exchange reserves, mostly held in the form of U.S. T-Bonds by emerging economies, are still an important puzzle. Why do emerging economies continue to willingly loan to the United States despite the low rates of return? We propose that a dynamic general equilibrium...

Managing capital flows and liquidity demand has been a central issue for emerging-market countries. In an era of global imbalances, rapid accumulation of foreign exchange reserves by surplus countries is also an issue for the international system. In a well-functioning international financial...

A key challenge facing most emerging market economies today is how to simultaneously maintain monetary independence, exchange rate stability and financial integration subject to the constraints imposed by the Trilemma, in an era of widespread globalization. In this paper we overview and contrast...

Some countries may face choice between targeting inflation independently and entering a monetary union that targets inflation. This paper shows that the choice of a country in favour of monetary union may be motivated by asymmetrical supply shocks. The demand shocks are neutralised under these...

This paper develops a simple mercantilism model for a small open economy and examines the real effects of macroeconomic policies. In this setting, the saddle-point stability of the model with wealth effects hinges on an interesting "relative smoothness condition" for foreign asset accumulation....

A key challenge facing most emerging market economies today is how to simultaneously maintain monetary independence, exchange rate stability and financial integration subject to the constraints imposed by the Trilemma, in the era of deepening globalization. In this paper we study the Trilemma...

Some emerging economies have recently experienced large government surpluses and accelerating foreign exchange reserve accumulation far in excess of what would be implied by the literature on optimal reserves. China in particular has repeatedly stressed that there may be an upper limit to how...