Carbon tariffs are one prominently discussed climate policy. The proponents stress the carbon tariffs’ ability to restore competitiveness, avoid carbon leakage, and reduce world carbon emissions. We analyze the effects of carbon tariffs on trade, welfare, and carbon emissions in a structural...

In this thesis, I set up a standard New Economic Geography model and estimate it in the regional context of the European Union. The analysis underlines the clear core-periphery structure of Europe, but also identifies forces that hint at a catching-up of lesser developed peripheral regions....

In December 2009 the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, in conjunction with Northwestern University’s Centre for International Economics and Development (CIED), hosted a monetary policy conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act. Passed in December 1989, the Act...

This paper uses wavelets to develop a core inflation measure for inflation targeting central banks. The analysis is applied to the case of New Zealand – the country with the longest history of explicit inflation targeting. We compare the performance of our proposed measure against some popular...

A compelling, but highly tractable, axiomatic foundation for intertemporal decision making is established and discussed. This axiomatic foundation relies on methods employed in cooperative bargaining theory. Four simple axioms imply that the intertemporal objective function is a weighted...

Consider an n-person bargaining problem where players bargain over the division of a cake whose size is stochastic. In such a game, the players are not only bargaining over the division of a cake, but they are also sharing risk. This paper presents the Nash bargaining solution to this problem,...

This paper uses wavelets to develop a core inflation measure for inflation targeting central banks. The analysis is applied to the case of New Zealand - the country with the longest history of explicit inflation targeting. We compare the performance of our proposed measure against some popular...

Market failures provide a rationale for policy intervention. But policies are often hard to alter once in place. We argue that this inertia can result in well-intended policies having sizable negative long-run effects on aggregate output and productivity. In our theory, financial frictions...

In our model, short-sighted policy-makers choose to subsidize productive entrepreneurs to relax their limited commitments. In the short-run, this policy reallocates capital from unproductive towards productive entrepreneurs, and boosts per-capita income, TFP and capital accumulation. Over time,...

I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model in which heterogeneous producers face collateral constraints, and study the effect of financial frictions on capital misallocation and aggregate productivity. My economy is isomorphic to a Solow model but with time-varying TFP. I argue that...