This paper studies the risk-return profile of centralized and decentralized banks. We address the conditions that favor a particular lending regime while acknowledging the effects on lending and returns caused by the course of the business cycle. To analyze these issues, we develop a model which...

This paper analyses how the existence of unemployment affects the conventional approach to vertical externalities. We discuss the optimality rule for the provision of public inputs both in an unitary and a federal country. Our findings show that decentralizing the spending responsability on...

The purpose of this article is to integrate the class of preferences developed by Gul and Pesendorfer into the theory of optimal redistributive taxation with heterogenous consumers and asymmetric information. The consumers are inclined to over-spend on a commodity for which they experience...

In a model where trade unions dominate the labor market, a relationship is derived between the rate of unemployment and the provision of a public input in the production. This relationship implies that for conventional rates of unemployment, the public input will be overprovided compared to the...

Over the last half-century female employment rates have increased significantly in many countries. This change has partly been attributed to a change in gender norms. The purpose of this paper is to present a dynamic model within which the evolution of female labor supply can be analyzed....

This paper concerns wage formation in a unionized economy when union membership is endogenous and determined by employment. A union is run by a leadership which has as an objective to strengthen the union's position in the labour market. This is achieved by building up membership. Among the...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation in the presence of emigration. The basic model is a two-period model where all agents are identical and live in the home country in the first period of life, but where some emigrate at the end of the first period. It is shown that with a binding credit...