The universal Scandinavian welfare model offers generous tax financed social benefits. The scheme is associated with workfare elements as a targeting device to direct benefits to those considered deserving. Thereby social insurance and egalitarian outcomes are achieved while work incentives and...

Empirical evidence documents substantial persistence in the adjustment process to nominal shocks. Existing open-economy models have failed either to generate interesting dynamics or found that the mechanisms are quantitatively weak. We consider the propagation of nominal shocks in a fully...

This paper takes a first step in analysing how a monetary union performs in the presence of labour market asymmetries. Differences in wage flexibility, market power and country sizes are allowed for in a setting with both country-specific and aggregate shocks. The implications of asymmetries for...