We add a minimum wage and hence involuntary unemployment to a conventional two-sector model of a perfectly competitive economy with optimal saving and endogenous growth. Our resulting model highlights the possible case of a backward-bending demand curve for labor, along which a hike in the...

Using both regression- and VAR-based estimates, the paper finds that the exchange rate pass-through to import prices for a large number of countries is incomplete and larger than the pass-through to export prices. Previous studies have reported similar results, which give rise to the puzzle that...

Foreign technological advance unambiguously reduces home welfare in a popular variant of the Melitz (2003) model that assumes the presence of a costlessly traded homogeneous good (Demidova, 2008). The present paper shows that this result is sensitive to the presence of such a good and is...

This paper provides robust evidence that news shocks about future investment-specific technology (IST) constitute a signicant force behind U.S. business cycles. Extending a recent empirical approach to identifying news shocks, we find that positive IST news shocks induce comovement, i.e., raise...

We build a unique industry-level panel data set to estimate border effects with respect to U.S.-Canada trade for each year from 1992 to 2005. Estimates from data aggregated at the province/state level yield border effects in the early 1990s that increase slightly and then decline after the...

This paper analyzes the origins of currency crises for 20 OECD countries and South Africa from 1970 through 1998. The main contributions are in three areas. First, it tests for contagious crises and attempts to recognize contagion channels by employing a duration analysis. Second, to minimize...

This paper empirically analyzes the effect of exchange rate regimes and capital account liberalization policies on the occurrence of currency crises for 21 countries over the period of1970-1998. We examine changes of the likelihood of currency crises under de jure, and de facto exchange rate...

The boom-years preceding the "Great Recession" were a time of rapid innovation in the financial industry. We explore the idea that both the boom and eventual bust emerged from overoptimistic ex-pectations of efficiency-gains in the financial sector. We treat the bankruptcy costs facing...

In this paper we conduct a further analysis on the Brander and Eaton (1984) model of product line rivalry by examining two cases that have not been studied previously. The common feature shared by these two cases is asymmetry between firms. Specifically, we examine situations where either a) the...