How does informality in emerging economies affect the conduct of monetary policy? To answer this question we construct a two-sector, formal-informal new Keynesian closed-economy. The informal sector is more labour intensive, is untaxed, has a classical labour market, faces high credit...

This paper reviews the literature on the informal economy, focusing first on empirical findings and then on existing approaches to modelling informality within both partial and general equilibrium environments. We concentrate on labour and credit markets, since these tend to be most affected by...

This paper examines the relationship between remittances from interna- tional migration and imperfections in labour and capital markets. We use a search-matching model of the labour market to show that remittances can have two opposing effects on the labour market of the source country. First,...

This survey reviews both theoretical and empirical papers that examine the economic effects of labour mobility with a particular reference to intra-European migration. We address three broad sets of issues: Firstly, the effect that immigration has on the host country's labour market. Although...

Using a calibrated two-bloc endogenous growth model of the European economy, we assess the growth and welfare impact of East-West European migration of different skill compositions. The East has a lower total factor productivity and a lower endowment of skilled labour. Migration can induce two...

We revisit the work of Borjas (1995) which has provided an influential positive theory of immigration policy. An important feature of his framework is the focus on the skill-composition of immigrants and we retain this feature in our paper. Our contribution to this literature is to extend his...

The UK, with its relatively liberal immigration policies following recent enlarge- ments, has been one of the main recipients of migrants from new EU member states. This paper poses the questions: what is the effect of immigration on a receiving econ- omy such as the UK? Is the effect beneficial...

This paper reviews the literature on the informal economy, focusing first on empirical findings and then on existing approaches to modeling informality within both partial and general equilibrium environments. We concentrate on labour and credit markets, since these tend to be most affected by...

We examine the performance of forward-looking inflation-forecast-based rules in open economies. In a New Keynesian two-bloc model, a methodology first employed by Batini and Pearlman (2002) is used to obtain analytically the feedback parameters/horizon pairs associated with unique and stable...

This paper provides a first attempt to quantify and at the same time utilize estimated measures of uncertainty for the design of robust interest rate rules. We estimate several variants of a linearized form of a New Keynesian model using quarterly US data. Both our theoretical and numerical...