In Africa there has been an immense effort in the past, continuing into the present, to unite politically and to build numerous economic integration areas. In this paper we discuss the reasons for the existence of this phenomenon in Africa which we call the drive to political and economic...

Using a panel of 21 OECD countries and 40 years of annual data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have business cycles that fluctuate more closely. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP)...

We introduce collective bargaining in a static framework where the firm and its risk-neutral employees negotiate over wages in a non-binding contract setting. Our main result is the equivalence between the non-binding collective equilibrium wage-employment contract and the equilibrium contract...

This paper provides an economic foundation for non-binding mediation to stimulate first collective bargaining agreements, as implemented in British Columbia since 1993. We show that the outcome of first-contract mediation is Pareto efficient and proves immune to the insider-outsider problem of...

We introduce collective bargaining in a static framework where the firm and its risk-neutral employees negotiate over wages in a non-binding contract setting. Our main result is the equivalence between the non-binding collective equilibrium wage-employment contract and the equilibrium contract...