Despite the modern origins of endogenous growth theory, we argue that the ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’ written by Immanuel Kant in 1784 provides an early and coherent example of such a theory. Kant’s endogenous growth mechanism is driven by the...

We argue that the New-Keynesian Phillips Curve literature has failed to deliver a convincing measure of real marginal costs. We start from a careful modeling of optimal price setting allowing for non-unitary factor substitution, non-neutral technical change and time-varying factor utilization...

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...

Dynamic principal-agent settings with asymmetric information but no commitment are well known to create a ratchet effect. Here, the most efficient agents must be provided with extra 'information rent' as an incentive to relinquish their informational advantage over an uninformed principal; this...

A New-Keynesian model with deep habits and optimal monetary policy delivers a fiscal multiplier above one and the crowding-in effect on private consumption obtainable in a Real Business Cycle model à la Ravn et al. (2006). Optimized Taylor-type or price-level interest rate rules yield...

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...

We consider two aspects of the commitment problem in price regulation with lobbying the ratchet effect and the hold-up problem. We set out a dynamic model of price regulation with asymmetric information where the regulated firm can ‘buy influence’ in a lobbying equilibrium. Firms can sink...

This note reassesses the basic result in Mukhopadhaya (2003) that, when jurors may acquire costly signals about a defendant’s guilt, with a larger jury size the probability of reaching a correct verdict may in fact fall, contrary to the Condorcet Jury Theorem. We show that if the jurors...

We reassess the gains from monetary policy coordination within the confines of the canonical NOEM in the light of three issues. First, the literature uses a number of cooperative and non-cooperative equilibrium concepts that do not always clearly distinguish commitment and discretionary...