This paper explores the business cycle in Bulgaria and the Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during the 1993-2005 period. The paper aims at deepening the understanding of the nature of output fluctuations. The neoclassical approach will be employed, much in the spirit of the real...

Motivated by the high public employment, and the public wage premia observed in Europe, a Real-Business-Cycle model, calibrated to German data (1970-2007), is set up with a richer government spending side, and an endogenous private-public sector labor choice. To illustrate the effects of fiscal...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between rent-seeking behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill, which is taken to represent the rent component. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between opportunistic behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals competing for a larger share of those public funds. A...

This paper shows that a modified real business cycle (RBC) model, one that includes home production and fiscal spending shocks, can solve one of the RBC puzzles and generates zero correlation between wages and hours. In addition, the micro-founded model presented here provides a sound...

We introduce consumption habits into a real-business-cycle setup augmented with a detailed government sector. We calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999-2018). We investigate the quantitative importance of the...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of collective bargaining agreements for the observed fluctuations in Bulgarian labor markets. Following Maffezzoli (2001), we introduce a monopoly union into a real-business-cycle model with government sector. We calibrate the model to...

This paper takes an otherwise standard real-business-cycle setup with government sector, and augments it with shocks to consumer confidence to study business cycle fluctuations. A surprise increase in consumer confidence generates higher utility, as the household values consumption more in that...

We introduce government production of both output-augmenting and utility-enhancing public services into an exogenous growth model with a detailed government sector, and calibrate the model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999-2016)....