In this paper we explore the hypothesis that the Swedish malaise comes from the interaction of the Swedish welfare state with changes in the global marketplace. External commerce can expose Swedish workers in exporting and import-competing industries to competition from low-wage foreign workers...

Graphs that allow side by side comparisons of the six longer US expansions since 1950 suggest that these expansions have four distinct phases: (1) a high growth recovery during which the rate of unemployment declines to its pre-recession level, (2) a modest growth plateau during which the rate...

This paper embeds variable effort into a traditional multi-sector model. Effort enters a production function like total-factor-productivity and on the assumption that effort doesn't affect capital depreciation, the capital-cost savings from high effort operations are passed on to workers. The...

The net imports of labor embodied in international trade has been a fairly small and stable share of the US labor force. From this some conclude that trade has not been a major contributor to the income inequality trends. This is a non sequitur. The labor embodied in trade is jointly determined...

Economic growth in Europe and Asia and Latin America could have contri- buted in many different ways to lower wages and increased income inequality that the United States has been experiencing. One plausible model that links external product markets to internal labor markets is the...

A free trade agreement supports global free trade since trade barriers tend to divert trade in favor of members, but not reduce imports. The term: 'mutual assured deterrence' is used to refer to a regional free trade association that has the feature that no member can gain individually from the...

Recent discussions of the effects of globalization and technological change on U.S. wages have suffered from inappropriate or missing references to the basic international trade theorems: The Factor Price Equalization Theorem, the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem and the Samuelson Duality Theorem....

This paper analyzes the extent to which education will be subsidized when the subsidy rate is determined by majority voting. The analysis takes place in a framework where education is a discrete decision and all individuals would like to obtain an education because of its effect on future...

This review of the empirical literature in international micro economics observes that data have had a disappointingly small effect on the intellectual lives of international economists. The reasons for this are many and diverse, but one general comment is made here: We need better balance...

Monthly US data on payroll employment, civilian employment, industrial production and the unemployment rate are used to define a recession-dating algorithm that nearly perfectly reproduces the NBER official peak and trough dates. The only substantial point of disagreement is with respect to the...