We show that the welfare costs of business cycles in a monetary union can be higher under incomplete financial markets than under complete markets. A monetary union with home bias, sticky prices and country-specific shocks is a second-best environment in which the structure of financial markets...

We develop a two-country model with an explicitly microfounded interbank market and sovereign default risk. Calibrated to the Euro Area, the model performs satisfactorily in matching key business cycle facts on real, financial and fiscal time series. We then use the model to assess the effects...

We analyze the effects of large war episodes (world wars) on the macroeconomic dynamics of four advanced countries (France, Germany, the UK and the U.S.) using a structural small open economy model estimated with Bayesian techniques. Our dataset is taken from Piketty and Zucman (2014) and goes...

Tax-based deficit reduction experiments for the U.S. and EMU-12 are conducted using an open economy model. In welfare terms, raising the consumption tax is the least costly, followed by the labor income tax, then the capital income tax. Use of an open economy model means that the incidence of...

In this paper, we bridge economic data and climatic time series to assess the vulnerability of a pre-industrial economy to changes in climatic conditions. We propose an economic model to extract a measure of total productivity from English data (real wages and land rents) in the pre-industrial...

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to investigate the impact of conflicts and wars on key macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. Using a panel data with 12 countries from 1875 onwards we first show that consumption drops more than output during conflicts, while the opposite is true...

We present an annual sequence of wages in England starting in 1245. We show that a standard AK-type growth model with capital externality and stochastic productivity shocks is unable to explain important features of the data. We then consider random returns to scale. Moderate episodes of...

In the US unemployment insurance (UI) system, only a fraction of those eligible for benefits actually collect them. We estimate this fraction using CPS data and detailed state-level eligibility criteria. It averaged 77% from 1989 - 2012 and is negatively correlated with the unemployment rate....

This paper deals with nonparametric estimation of conditional densities in mixture models. The proposed approach consists to perform a preliminary clustering algorithm to guess the mixture component of each observation. Conditional densities of the mixture model are then estimated using kernel...