This paper develops a Bertrand Price Competition model with differentiated goods in which export subsidies are compared to exchange rate depreciation as different government policies for promoting exports. National governments may wish to help domestic firms to expand market shares in profitable...

The conservative central banker has come under attack recently. Explicitly modeling the interaction of a trade union with monetary policy, it has been argued that the standard solution to the inflationary bias in monetary policy might actually be welfare reducing if the trade union has an...

Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income...

This paper presents a characterization of a welfare index for the evaluation of primary goods (to be understood as those goods that all agents should enjoy equally). The welfare associated with a given distribution of n primary goods among m agents is measured as the sum of n real-valued...

A theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid social humiliation. In a general equilibrium framework it is shown that as long as migration can reduce humiliation sufficiently, migration will occur even between two identical economies. Migration increases the...

Conventional banking practices do not easily accommodate the financial needs of poor persons. Group-lending, on the other hand, has found several advantages in the context of poor borrowers with no collateral to offer. An important advantage is that the bank’s losses due to unsuccessful...

Performance budgeting schemes in the public sector have to operate with imperfect performance measures. We argue that these imperfections lead to wasteful fund-seeking (window dressing and lobbying) by the administrative units that produce public services. We develop a game-theoretical model to...

This paper takes a welfare-view on eastern enlargement of the EU, focusing on incumbent countries. Enlargement is decomposed into three elements: Single-market integration on commodity markets, budgetary costs from EU-expenditure policies, and single-market-induced migration from new to present...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...