We consider the dynamic relationship between product market entry regulation and equilibrium unemployment. The main theoretical contribution is combining a Mortensen-Pissarides model with monopolistic competition in the goods market and individual wage bargaining. Product market competition...

This paper develops an empirical framework giving rise to a nonlinear behaviour of the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT). Rather than shifts between low and high inflation, the nonlinearity arises when large swings in the exchange rate trigger market entries and exits of importing firms....

We analyze quarterly occupation-level data from the US Current Population Survey for 1976-2013. Based on common cyclical employment dynamics, we identify two clusters of occupations that roughly correspond to the widely discussed notion of "routine" and "non-routine" jobs. After decomposing the...

No, not really. Responding to lingering concerns about the reliability of SVARs, Christiano et al (NBER Macro Annual, 2006, "CEV") propose to combine OLS estimates of a VAR with a spectral estimate of long-run variance. In principle, this could help alleviate specification problems of SVARs in...

Monetary policy is most effective when public beliefs about future policies are actively managed. This is the appeal of policy rules and commitment strategies, typically absent under discretion. But when a policymaker has some private information - as is the case in reality - belief management...

I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Governments balance benefits of default induced redistribution and costs due to income losses in the wake of a default. Their choice of short- versus long- term debt affects default and rollover decisions by...

Recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad. We replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps....

It is often argued that capital should flow from aging industrialized economies to countries with fast-growing populations. However, institutional failures and the risk of expropriation substantially reduce developing economies' attractiveness for foreign investors. We analyze the influence of a...

Starting with Krugman (1980), much literature has analyzed how trade liberalization affects the economy based on the notion that trade is motivated by consumer’s love of variety. In this paper, I augment these preferences by the determinants of demand for heterogeneous products. The model...