An equilibrium analysis of central bank independence and inflation

Banks and banking, Central ; Inflation (Finance)

An analysis of the impact of two fiscal policies on the behavior of a dynamic asset market

Fiscal policy

An alternative neo-classical growth model with close-form decision rules

Econometric models

A primer on the nature of business cycles

Discussions of the effects of monetary and fiscal policy sometimes center on the impact of such policies in ameliorating fluctuations associated with the business cycle. However, though familiar with the term "business cycle," many people are not aware of what it refers to exactly. In this article, Gregory Huffman presents an explanation of the term and provides a detailed illustration of post-World War II U.S. business cycles. He also contrasts the behavior of various U.S. economic time series over the business cycle with similar Canadian statistics and points out some apparent anomalies in the data.Business cycles ; Monetary policy ; Time-series analysis

On the political economy of immigration and income redistribution

Emigration and immigration ; Income distribution

On the political economy of immigration

Emigration and immigration

On the existence of nonoptimal equilibria in dynamic stochastic economies

Economic development

The political economy of endogenous taxation and redistribution

Taxation

Institutions and Contract Enforcement

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions – dismissal barriers, and bonus pay – affect contract enforcement behavior in a market with incomplete contracts and repeated interactions. Dismissal barriers are shown to have a strong negative impact on worker performance, and market efficiency, by interfering with firms' use of firing threat as an incentive device. Dismissal barriers also distort the dynamics of worker effort levels over time, cause firms to rely more on the spot market for labor, and create a distribution of relationship lengths in the market that is more extreme, with more very short and more very long relationships. The introduction of a bonus pay option dramatically changes the market outcome. Firms are observed to substitute bonus pay for threat of firing as an incentive device, almost entirely offsetting the negative incentive and efficiency effects of dismissal barriers. Nevertheless, contract enforcement behavior remains fundamentally changed, because the option to pay bonuses causes firms to rely less on long-term relationships. Our results show that market outcomes are the result of a complex interplay between contract enforcement policies and the institutions in which they are embedded

The dynamics of immigration policy with wealth-heterogeneous immigrants

In this paper we consider a simple intertemporal economy in which immigrants, if admitted, bring heterogeneous amounts of capital. We show that under certain conditions there is a level of immigration which maximizes the economy's capital-labor ratio, and that this level of immigration is the preferred choice of a majority of the economy's citizens. We then characterize, in an overlapping generations setting, the dynamics of capital accumulation and immigration policy, which can include multiple steady state equilibria and a sensitivity of immigration levels to changes in the economy's technology growth rate.Emigration and immigration