In this paper, we take another approach to accounting for the sources of Singapore’s economic growth by being explicit about the channels through which Singapore, as a technological follower, benefits from international R&D spillovers. Taking into account the channels through which technology...

Is there a theoretical basis for the view that the end of a period of over-investment necessarily leads to a period of below-normal employment as the excess capital stock is run down? We study the repercussions of a false boom in housing driven by prior expectations of future housing prices not...

This paper is in three parts. The first part discusses the workings of a wage subsidy scheme in boosting employment and earnings of workers. The second part reviews the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of wage subsidy schemes in countries that have implemented them both as countercyclical...

The current sluggish performance of the US economy follows one of the more remarkable booms in modern history. The late 1990s was a period of simultaneous output and productivity growth, low unemployment and stable inflation, culminating in an unemployment rate of only 3.9% in the fourth quarter...

This paper evaluates the Prescott (2004) hypothesis that permanently higher payroll taxes fully explain the decline in number of market hours worked in Europe (relative to America) over three decades. The Prescott model made assumptions that, in steady state, left out any incentive for either...

We study here the effects of future tax and budgetary shocks on present levels of economic activity and real interest rates in a nonmonetary and possibly non-Ricardian economy. The paper first takes up an (unanticipated) temporary tax cut to be effective on a given future date—a delayed...

Open-economy macroeconomics contains a monetary model in the Keynesian tradition that is deemed serviceable for analyzing the short run and a nonmonetary neoclassical model thought capable of handling the long run. But do the Keynesian and neoclassical models meet the challenges thrown out by...

This paper studies the factors responsible for the secular decline of Singapore’s unemployment rate over the period 1966-2000 in an environment of low and stable inflation rates. We introduce wage bargaining and unions into a specific-factors, two-sector economy with an export sector and a...