From 1870 to 2000, the workweek length of employed persons decreased by 41 per cent in industrialized countries. The employment rate, employment per working age person, displays large movements but no clear secular pattern. This motivated the question: What accounts for the large decrease in the...

This paper examines how changes in urban industrial network structures explain the growth rates of labor productivity in cities. I formulate a multi-sector general equilibrium model with input-output networks of firms within a city and trade across cities. A key input to this framework is an...

We study the situation when a commodity-exporting economy is under sanctions and cannot use its accumulated fx-reserves or attract new fx-debt to smooth import restrictions amid slower decline of income flow from a commodity-export. Our study attempts to determine the adequate response of the...

We develop and quantitatively implement a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor market matching and endogenous job destruction. The model produces a close match with data on job creation and destruction. Cyclical fluctuations in the job destruction rate serve to magnify the effects of...

In this paper, we construct a two-country business cycle accounting model in order to investigate quantitatively the relationship between Japan and the Asian Tigers. Our model is based on Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (1994) in which each economy produces tradable intermediate goods that are...

This paper provides a general equilibrium model of income tax evasion. As functions of the share of income reported, the paper contributes an analytic derivation of the tax elasticity of taxable income, the welfare cost of the tax, and government revenue as a percent of output. It shows how an...

Three decades have passed since China dramatically opened up to the global market and began to catch up rapidly with leading economies. In this paper we discuss the effects of Chinafs opening-up and rapid growth on the welfare of both China and the rest of the world (ROW). We find that the...

This study employs a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model to analyze the dynamic effects of wage changes on Ghana's economy. In particular, the paper sheds light on how changes in wages affect the short-run and long-run dynamics of labor productivity, employment and prices in the...

During the downturn of 2008–2009, output and hours fell significantly, but labor productivity rose. These facts have led many to conclude that there is a significant deviation between observations and current macrotheories that assume business cycles are driven, at least in part, by...

This paper proposes a simple model that formalizes a variant of Ohanian's (2001) conjecture explaining the productivity declines observed in the Great Depression. If a large payment shock like an asset-price collapse renders many firms insolvent, other economic agents become exposed to a higher...