Ways of improving the efficiency of Monte-Carlo (MC) techniques are studied for dynamic models. Such models cause the conventinal Antithetic Variate (AV) technique to fail, and will be proved to reduce the benefit from using Control Variates with nearly non-stationary series. This paper suggest...

The paper revisits the popular gravity model of trade in the light of the increasingly acknowledged findings of spatial econometrics and interprets the results in view of some recent theoretical developments from the economic literature that contribute to its foundation. When the inherent...

Advance production serves as a means of quantity commitment. Therefore an oligopolist, unlike a monopolist, may have an incentive to invest in advance production in order to pre-empt its opponent(s) even when [i] it is technologically more costly than on-spot production, and [ii] it does not...

This paper assesses the scale of the costs of European Monetary Union when shocks are asymmetric. This is done considering time consistent policies within a small theoretical two country model, with parameter values chosen from empirical work. The model builds on earlier work by incoporating a...

The limiting marginal density of efficient estimators of bivariate cointegration vectors is derived in closed form. The formula is exact, and it consists of highly efficient convergent expansion. It is used to plot the density. Furthermore, it is manipulated analytically to reveal features that...

We re-examine, from a political economy perspective, the standard view that higher capital mobility results in lower capital taxes - a view, in fact, that is not confirmed by the available empirical evidence. We show that when a small economy is opened to capital mobility, the change of...

This paper addresses the issue of selecting pricing institutions in a bilateral monopoly. Suppose a bayer and seller can benefit from exchanging one unit of a good. The selelr is entitled to select the pricing institution. He can either make a take-it-leave-it offer or enter a bargaining game.

New trade theory suggests that improvements in the variety and quality of products may be as important as price competitiveness as an explanation of trade flows. This paper tests this proposition for export volumes for the G7 using relative cumulated investment as a proxy for innovation....

This paper sets up an OLG economy with endogenous life expectancy to study how fiscal policy that redistributes between generations can open the door to sunspot equilibria. Agents invest independently in their own human capital, produce and consume output, and receive a pension upon retirement....

Income-based targeting (or means-testing) reduces social security benefits as income rises. This form of targeting entails a well-known incentive distortion; the prospect for the recipients of losing part of their benefits if they were to earn more can deter them to work harder. In this paper,...