We examine the effect of international price arbitrage on the effectiveness of unilateral export controls. The restriction on the quality of exports of security sensitive products limits the outside option of domestic customers: if the product available on the international market is of low...

Composition bias in aggregate wages is often a scapegoat for the apparent unresponsiveness of wages over the cycle. Since Bils (1985) and in particular Solon et al. (1994), who find that that real wages are highly pro-cyclical a general consensus has emerged that the observed 'mild' cyclicality...

Over the last several years debate over monetary policy has focused on two issues, inflation targeting and asset price bubbles. This paper explores the case for explicitly targeting asset price bubbles, a policy that the Federal Reserve Bank has opposed on the grounds that it is both infeasible...

This paper reexamines the issue of international financial capital mobility, which is today's economic orthodoxy. Discussion is often framed in terms of the impossible trinity. That framing distorts discussion by representing capital mobility as having equal significance with sovereign monetary...

New Keynesian DSGE models propose a dynamic and expectational version of the old IS-LM paradigm. Acknowledging that the Taylor rule as a substitute for the LM-curve has its merits we show that standard DSGE models do not model how the central bank achieves its targets. In filling this gap we...

This paper explores the macroeconomics of fiscal austerity and deflation in an economy with public debt. A binding budget deficit cap destabilizes the economy by turning the government budget into an automatic destabilizer. Public debt helps maintain AD in the presence of deflation because...

In this paper we investigate the macroeconomic consequences of the introduction of an unemployment benefit system and a minimum wage barrier for both skilled and unskilled workers against the background of Goodwin's (1967) model. In the analyzed framework, characterized by free "hiring" and...

In this paper we present a model of flexicurity capitalism that exhibits a second labor market with the government as an employer of first resort, where all workers not employed by firms in the private sector find meaningful employment. We show that the model exhibits a unique interior steady...