Official adjustments of the budget balance to the cycle assume that the only category of gov-ernment spending that responds automatically to the cycle is unemployment compensation. But estimates show otherwise. Payments for pensions, sickness, subsistence, invalidity, childcare and subsidies of...

The macroeconomic literature on automatic stabilization tends to focus on taxes and dismiss the relevance of government expenditure, aside from unemployment compensation. Our results go sharply contrary to this view. We engage in an empirical analysis of 20 OECD countries from 1980-2001 and find...

This paper investigates whether the higher prevalence of South multinational enterprises (MNEs) in risky developing countries may be explained by the experience that they have acquired of poor institutional quality at home. We confirm the intuitions provided by our analytical model by...

Conventional wisdom has it that increasing price or exchange rate uncertainty will depress investment. Using the Dixit-Pindyck model, we find that there are situations where this does happen; and situations where it does not – i.e. increasing uncertainty leads to more investment. It depends...

We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term influence of potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the external...

"The macroeconomic literature on automatic stabilization tends to focus on taxes and dismiss the relevance of government expenditure except for unemployment compensation. Our results go sharply contrary to this view. We engage in an empirical analysis of 21 OECD countries from 1982 to 2003 and...