As noted by Alan Greenspan in 2008, one key flaw in standard models is that they treat animal spirits as a simple 'add factor' rather than as a structural one. This paper evaluates the extent to which two recent approaches placing the emphasis on animal spirits - namely Farmer's...

We depart from the assumption of perfect competition in the final goods sector, commonly used in cash-in-advance (CIA) models, providing extensive theoretical analysis of the general equilibrium of an economy with imperfect competition, endogenous production and fully flexible prices in the...

The European Union has recently proposed sectoral tax differentiation as a policy to fight unemployment. The member countries are allowed to reduce the VAT rates on goods and services that are particularly labor intensive and price elastic. The paper provides a theoretical analysis of the...

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...

The economic effects of environmental taxes depend on the market structure. Under imperfect competition with free entry and exit, environmental taxes have an impact on economies of scale by changing the number and size of firms. Whether economies of scale rise or fall in a particular industry...