The paper examines policy externalities between imperfectly competitive open economies where unemployment prevails in general equilibrium. We develop a two-country and two-sector model with monopolistic competition in the goods market and wage bargaining in the labor market. Policy externalities...

This paper presents a way to explore how macroeconomic shifts cause inequality changes. It is based on the backwardness observed in the agricultural sector in rural areas. It shows why highly dualistic economies tend to be more unequal than economies with flexible and integrated labour markets....

We use a dynamic general-equilibrium model to study how removing barriers to competition in the nontraded goods sector affects the current account of a small open economy. We show that the expansion of the nontraded sector that results from such a "deregulation shock" is associated with an...

We examine the drivers of inequality change in Honduras between 1991-2007, trying to understand why inequality increased in Honduras until 2005, while it was falling in most other Latin American countries. Using annual household surveys, we document first rising inequality between 1991-2005,...

By disaggregating price indices, it becomes apparent that the real exchange rate consists of the real exchange rate for a single good and a weighted sum of relative prices between goods. When applying a battery of panel unit root tests to this sum and its components, it is found that both the...

In this paper we present a critical overview of differnt methods of constructing an equilibrium exchange rate. The recent literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates that on its own PPP is not a good vehicle for defining an equilibrium exchange rate. Rather, we argue that the latter...

We test for mean reversion in real exchange rates using a recently developed unit root test for non-normal processes based on quantile autoregression inference in semi-parametric and non-parametric settings. The quantile regression approach allows us to directly capture the impact of different...

In this paper we show the consequences of applying a panel unit root test when testing for a purchasing power parity relationship. The distribution of the tests investigated, including the IPS test of Im et al (1997), are influenced by a common stochastic trend which is usually not accounted...

We examine the asymptotic behavior of unit root tests against nonlinear alternatives of the exponential smooth transition type if the data is erroneously nonlinearly transformed. We show analytically and by a Monte Carlo study that the probability of rejecting the correct null of a random walk...