The public debt stock in some economically developed countries continues to increase because of a lack of tax revenues and the concomitant burdens of social security. Many of those countries suffer from lower birth rates and consequently, have fewer children. Child allowances might be an...

The paper sets up a two-country asymmetric trade model with heterogeneous firms,search frictions and endogenous labor market institutions. Countries are linked by tradein goods and non-cooperatively set unemployment benefits to maximize national welfare.We show that more open and smaller...

Governments purchase everything from airplanes to zucchini. This paper investigates whether the technological intensity of government demand affects corporate R&Dactivities. In a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth, we show that an increase in the share of government purchases in high-tech...

We propose a model of production where technical change is both time and management induced. We define a general management index in addition to the general time index of Baltagi and Griffin (1988) and use them as arguments in the translog productionfunction. Time and management induced...

The existing literature has shown that special interest groups can have both growthenhancing and retarding effects on an economy. In either case it is always assumed thatthe nature of the special interest groups remains constant over time. The hypothesis ofthis paper is that a dynamic...

Business cycle indicators based on the balance statistics are a widely used method tomonitor the actual economic situation. In contrast to official data, indicators frombusiness surveys are early available and typically not revised after their first publication.But as surveys can be in general...

Empirical literature has found evidence in favour of household bargaining models.In contrast to earlier tests that are limited to assignable private goods, we use childpreference data in order to extend the empirical evidence on household bargaining topublic household goods. In the empirical...

Former theoretical and empirical studies find that precautionary savings are reduced inthe presence of social security systems. The saving motive, however, does not change:individuals respond to increasing income risk by increasing their savings. Although thisstill holds for common tax and...