This paper explores the influence of wage and price staggering on monetary persistence. We show that, for plausible parameter values, wage and price staggering are complementary in generating monetary persistence. We do so by proposing the new measure of "quantitative inertia," after discussing...

This paper analyzes the effect of firing costs on aggregate productivity growth. For this purpose, a model of endogenous growth through selection and imitation is developed. It is consistent with recent evidence on firm dynamics and on the importance of reallocation for productivity growth. In...

Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with...

The negative correlation between female employment and fertility in industrialized nations has weakened since the 1960s, particularly in the United States. We suggest that the continuing influx of low-skilled immigrants has led to a substantial reduction in the trade-off between work and...

It is common knowledge that the standard New Keynesian model is not able to generate a persistent response in output to temporary monetary shocks. We show that this shortcoming can be remedied in a simple and intuitively appealing way through the introduction of labor turnover costs (such as...

Real life applications of Yardstick Regulation frequently refer to historical cost data. While Yardstick Regulation cuts the link between firms own costs and prices firms may charge in a static setting, it does not in a dynamic setting where historical cost data is used. A firm can influence the...

In many cases fjords cause disconnections in the road network, calling for the service of ferries. The construction of bridges or subsea tunnels may, however, substitute the ferries, often financed by toll charges. In this paper we use data on commuting flows from a Norwegian region with a high...

The distance puzzle has been wildly discussed in the literature since Leamer and Levinsohn (1995) shed the light on it. This puzzle simply says that "the world is not getting smaller": distance still matters to account for trade. This is reflected in a decreasing distance of trade (DOT), or in a...

The importance of credit market imperfections for investment behavior is analyzed using Swedish firm level data. Adjustment and agency costs are included in the neoclassical theory of optimal financial and investment decisions for firms. In order to model the possible occurrence of agency costs...

While examining the macroeconomic effects of increased government control of the informal sector, this paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium model featuring matching frictions, and heterogeneous workers in terms of moral. This facilitates an analysis of how wage setting and...