Aggregate Supply and Potential Output

The New-Keynesian aggregate supply derives from micro-foundations an inflation-dynamics model very much like the tradition in the monetary literature. Inflation is primarily affected by: (i) economic slack; (ii) expectations; (iii) supply shocks; and (iv) inflation persistence. This paper extends the New Keynesian aggregate supply relationship to include also fluctuations in potential output, as an additional determinant of the relationship. Implications for monetary rules and to the estimation of the Phillips curve are pointed out.

Globalization and Disinflation: A Note

The note analyzes how globalization forces induce monetary authorities, guided in their policies by the welfare criterion of a representative household, to put greater emphasis on reducing the inflation rate than on narrowing the output gaps.

FDI Contribution to Capital Flows and Investment in Capacity

The paper surveys a theory of FDI, which captures a unique feature: hands-on management standards, that enable investors to react in real time to a changing economic environment. Equipped with superior managerial skills, foreign direct investors are able to outbid portfolio investors for the top productivity firms in a particular industry in which they have specialized in the source country. Consequently, FDI investors would make investment, both larger, and of higher quality (namely, with large rates of returns), than the domestic investors. The theory can explain both two-way FDI flows among developed countries, and one-way FDI flows from developed to developing countries. Gains to the host country from FDI stem from the informational value of FDI. The predictions of the theory are consistent with evidence from panel data: larger FDI coefficients in the domestic investment and output growth regressions relative to the portfolio equity flow and international loan coefficients, reflect a more significant role for FDI in the domestic investment process than other types of capital inflows.

Free vs. Restricted Immigration: Bilateral Country Study

This paper tests the differential effects of the generosity of the welfare state under free migration and under policy-controlled migration, distinguishing between source developing and developed countries. We utilize free-movement within the EU to examine the free migration regime and compare that to immigration into the EU from two other groups, developed and developing source countries, to capture immigration-restricted regimes. We standardize cross-country education quality differences by using the Hanushek-Woessmann (2009) cognitive skills measure. We find strong support for the "magnet hypothesis" under the free-migration regime, and the "fiscal burden hypothesis" under the immigration-restricted regime even after controlling for differences in returns to skills in source and host countries

Testing Ricardian Neutrality with an Intertemporal Stochastic Model

The purpose of this paper is to develop and estimate a stochastic-intertemporal model of consumption behavior and to use it for testing a version of the Ricardian-equivalence proposition with time series data. Two channels that may give rise to deviations from this proposition are specified: Finite horizons and liquidity constraints. In addition, the model incorporates explicitly the roles of taxes, substitution between public , and private consumption, and different degrees of consumer goods' durability. The evidence, based on data for Israel in the first half of the 1980s, supports the Ricardian neutrality specification, yielding plausible estimates for the behavioral parameters of the aggregate consumption function.

Fiscal and Migration Competition

It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a ‘race to the bottom’. This result may indeed hold in the case of factor mobility (such as capital). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the’race to the bottom’ hypothesis. Labor migration is governed not only by net-of-tax factor rewards, but rather importantly also by the benefits that the welfare state provides. The paper analyzes fiscal competition with and without migration in a two-country, political-economy, model with labor of different skills. The paper assigns an active fiscal role for both the host and the source countries. It models the host country stylistically as a core EU welfare state, with tax financed benefits and migration policies, and the migration source country as an accession country (following the EU enlargement to 27 states), with its own welfare (tax-benefit) policy. We let these two asymmetric countries (in terms of their productivity) engage in fiscal competition. Using numerical simulations we examine how the migration and tax policies are shaped, and how they are affected by whether the skilled or the unskilled are in power. As the driving force behind migration is a productivity gap, we also analyze the implications of the productivity gap for the design of migration and tax policies.

Capital Income Taxation in the Globalized World

The behavior of taxes on capital income in the recent decades points to the notion that international tax competition that follows globalization of capital markets put strong downward pressures on the taxation of capital income; a race to the bottom. This behavior has been perhaps most pronounced in the EU-15 following the single market act of 1992. The 2004 enlargement of the EU with 10 new entrants put a strong downward pressure on capital income taxation for the EU-15 countries. Tax havens, and the inadequacy of cooperation among national tax authorities in the OECD in information exchanges, put binding ceilings on how much foreign-source capital income can be taxed. What then are the implications for the taxes on domestic-source capital income? The paper demonstrates that even if some enforcement of taxation on foreign-source capital income is feasible, a poor enforcement of international taxes would generate political processes that would reduce significantly the domestic-source capital income taxation.

The Role of Immigration in Sustaining the Social Security System: A Political Economy Approach

In the political debate people express the idea that immigrants are good because they can help pay for the old. The paper explores this idea in a dynamic political-economy setup. We characterize sub-game perfect Markov equilibria where immigration policy and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security system are jointly determined through a majority voting process. The main feature of the model is that immigrants are desirable for the sustainability of the social security system, because the political system is able to manipulate the ratio of old to young and thereby the coalition which supports future high social security benefits. We demonstrate that the older is the native born population the more likely is that the immigration policy is liberalized; which in turn has a positive effect on the sustainability of the social security system.