Questions over the role of the IMF in the economic development and adjustment in developing countries have been the topic of intensive research and debate in recent years. Although most studies find that participation in an IMF program helps facilitate balance of payments adjustment, research in...

We study the effects of fiscal policy rules on the determinacy of rational expectations equilibrium in a perfectly competitive monetary model with constant returns. Government spending implies a distortion of the monetary steady state due to the implied taxation. We show that policy rules that...

This paper studies the link between a firms education level, export performance and wages of its workers. We argue that firms may escape intense competition in international markets by using high skilled workers to differentiate their products. This story is consistent with our empirical...

This paper analyzes the tax competition and tax exporting effect of financial integration. On the one hand, financial integration increases capital mobility and thus the incentive for countries to compete for capital. On the other hand, financial integration increases foreign ownership of firms...

We show that using data which are properly available in real time when assessing the sensitivity of asset prices to economic news leads to different empirical findings than when data availability and timing issues are ignored. We do this by focusing on a particular example, namely Chen, Roll and...

The dual income tax combines a progressive tax schedule for labour income with a low flat tax rate on capital income and corporate income. This paper restates the case for the dual income tax and discusses alternative methods of taxing business income under such a tax system, paying special...

This paper introduces an index of tax optimality that measures the distance of some current tax structure from the optimal tax structure in the presence of public goods. In doing so, we derive a [0,1] number that reveals immediately how far the current tax configuration is from the optimal one...

In this paper we consider a risk averse worker who is moving back and forth between employment and unemployment; layoffs are random and beyond the worker's influcence, while the re-employment chance is directly affected by search effort. We characterize the worker's optimal savings and...

This paper examines how revenues from a natural resource interact with growth and welfare in an overlapping generations model with altruism. The revenues are allocated between public productive services and direct transfers to members of society by spending policies. We analyze how these...