We set up a two-region model to study the policy challenge of bringing the North's income up to the level of the South in the UK. The model focuses on labour costs as the driver of output gains through the international competitiveness channel. The empirical results show that the regional model...

We study the sustainability of pension systems using a life-cycle model with distortionary taxation that sets an upper limit to the real value of tax revenues. This limit implies an endogenous threshold dependency ratio, i.e. a point in the cross-section distribution of the population beyond...

Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic...

This paper investigates whether housing collateral is important to the business cycle in China. We develop two models, one without housing collateral as benchmark and one variant allowing for it. Indirect Inference procedure tests these two models' compatibility with the data. We find that the...