Does trade affect the equilibrium rate of unemployment? To answer this question, we propose a small open economy model that incorporates realistic features of labour markets. The model predicts that a sustained improvement in the terms of trade lowers unemployment. We test this prediction for...

We study the political economy of labour market policies. First, it is shown that tax and redistributive considerations lead inside workers to prefer spending on active labour market programmes to passive spending, e.g., on unemployment benefits. We also show that greater active spending may be...

Recent interest has been stimulated by the growth of income inequality in most developed countries during the 1980s and 1990s. However, considerable uncertainty still exists as to which factors have been the most important causes of this development. This article uses a measure of income...

We provide a simple model to illustrate that tax and redistributive considerations as well as increasing globalization may lead workers unexposed to the threat of unemployment to prefer government spending on active labour market programmes to passive spending, e.g., on unemployment benefits. In...

Immigration is a controversial topic in most developed economies. The presence of a redistributive welfare state in all major immigrant host countries creates a margin on which immigration affects native welfare. The primary focus of the paper is whether a large intake of immigrants reduces...

Does trade affect the equilibrium rate of unemployment? To theoretically examine this question, we incorporate firm-union bargaining considerations into a model with a booming external sector and a stagnating manufacturing sector. In the model, a sustained improvement in the terms of trade...

Temporal aggregation creates contemporaneous correlations, alters dynamic links and may distort causality inference. Since cointegration is invariant to temporal aggregation and implies Granger causality this paper presents a sign rule for causal inference and contemporaneous conditioning in...

The magnitude of the rise in inflation rate in Indonesia during the height of the 1997 financial crisis was among the sharpest that the East Asian economies has ever witnessed in the recent decades. This paper empirically tests the monetary hypotheses of inflation and compares and contrasts the...