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 propose a dynamic model of an oligopoly industry characterized by spatial competition between multi-store firms. Firms compete in prices and decide where to open or close stores depending on demand conditions and the number of competitors at different locations, and on location-specific...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

We examine the sources of macroeconomic economic fluctuations by estimating a variety of medium-scale DSGE models within a unified framework that incorporates regime switching both in shock variances and in the inflation target. Our general framework includes a number of different model features...

Credit constraints that link a private agent’s debt to market-determined prices embody a credit externality that drives a wedge between competitive and constrained socially optimal equilibria, inducing private agents to overborrow. The externality arises because agents fail to internalize the...

We argue that positive comovements between land prices and business investment are a driving force behind the broad impact of land-price dynamics on the macroeconomy. We develop an economic mechanism that captures the comovements by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: we introduce...

The possibility of regime shifts in monetary policy can have important effects on rational agents' expectation formation and equilibrium dynamics. In a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model where the monetary policy rule switches between a dovish regime that accommodates inflation and a...

We study how total factor productivity (TFP), energy prices, and the Great Moderation are linked. First we estimate a joint stochastic process for the energy price and TFP and establish that until the second quarter of 1982, energy prices negatively affected productivity. This spillover has...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where workers can engage in search while on the job. We show that on-the-job search is a key component in explaining labor market dynamics in models of equilibrium unemployment. The model predicts fluctuations of unemployment, vacancies, and labor...

We estimate a New Keynesian DSGE model on French, German, Italian, and Spanish data. The main aim of this paper is to check for the respective sets of parameters that are stable over time, making use of the ESS procedure ('Estimate of Set of Stable parameters') developed by Inoue and Rossi...