Recent studies suggest a considerable amount of horizontal strategic interaction amongst governments exists. The empirical approach in these studies typically relies on estimating reaction functions in a uni-dimensional policy framework, where a nonzero slope estimate suggests strategic...

The authors provide empirical evidence on the dynamic effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We distinguish between surprise and anticipated tax changes using a timing convention. We document that pre-announced but not yet implemented tax cuts give rise to contractions in output,...

The Kyoto Protocol on climate change allocates tradable quotas to developed countries, but let them free to choose the means to respect their quota. There are good reasons for a country not to control its firms through internationally tradable permits. We thus compare a tax and purely domestic...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policyanalysis in which decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. The specification of the central bank objective is general...

We develop a new general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms, variable demand elasticities and endogenously determined wages. Trade integration favours wage convergence, boosts competition, and forces the least efficient firms to leave the market, thereby affecting aggregate...

We consider a model with frictional unemployment and staggered wage bargaining where hours worked are negotiated for each period. The workers' bargaining power in the working time negotiations affects both unemployment volatility and inflation persistence. The closer to zero this parameter, (i)...

This paper presents information on wage-bargaining institutions, collected for 23 European countries, plus the US and Japan using a standardised questionnaire. Our data provide information from the years 1995 and 2006, for four sectors of activity and the aggregate economy. The main findings...

This paper proposes a simple and model-consistent method for combining forecasts generated by structural micro-founded models and judgmental forecasts. The method also enables the judgmental forecasts to be interpreted through the lens of the model. We illustrate the proposed methodology with a...

Bidding in the last seconds or minutes of an auction is a common strategy in Internet auctions with fixed end-times. This paper examines the three explanations of late bidding in eBay auctions that survived the first scrutiny in Roth and Ockenfels (2002). There is no indication that late bidding...

We study sources and consequences of fluctuations in the housing market. The upward trend in real housing prices of the last 40 years can be explained by slow technological progress in the housing sector. Over the business cycle, housing demand and housing technology shocks explain one-quarter...