We explore the impact of multilateral liberalization, with emphasison distributional effects across countries. We first develop a realistic "base1ine" that takes into account events such as the entry of China into the WTO and the enlargement of the EU, allowing us to focus on those effects that...

We explore the relationship between import protection and the household distribution of income. We first develop a general-equilibrium mapping from tariffs to household inequality measures. This also yields predictions for linkages between tariffs, development level, and observed household...

Because of concern that OECD tariff reductions will translate into worsening export performance for the least developed countries, trade preferences have proven a stumbling block to developing country support for multilateral liberalization. We examine the actual scope for preference erosion,...

The Nash bargaining solution of a modified bargaining problem in the contract space yields the pair of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium proposals in the alternating offers model, also for positive time between proposals. As time vanishes, convergence to the Nash bargaining solution is...

In this note I argue that the desirability of fiscal policy in response to the current crisis depends on whether one views the current crisis as a temporary deviation from a unique equilibrium or as a bad equilibrium out of multiple equilibria. The paper presents a simple Diamond (1982) type of...

We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of labour income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into an...

The linear Gaussian state space model for which the common variance is treated as a stochastic time-varying variable is considered for the modelling of economic time series. The focus of this paper is on the simultaneous estimation of parameters related to the stochastic processes of the mean...

This paper gives an overview and evaluates the literature on Microfoundations.<P>

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of social capital. Most of these studies use a measure of trust to define social capital empirically. In this paper we use three different measures of social capital: the size of the individual’s social network, the extent of their...

We consider a duopoly in a homogenous goods market where part of the consumers are ex ante uninformed about prices. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following results. First, there is no monotone relationship...