A model of a dependent central bank that internalizes the government’s budget constraint is used to examine the optimal composition of the euro zone. The model embodies the desire to stimulate output and to provide monetary financing to governments. Unable to pre-commit to first-best policies, the central bank produces excess inflation — a tendency partially reduced in a monetary union. On the ...

We analyse the internal spatial wage and employment structures of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, using regional data for 1996–2000. A new economic geography model predicts wage gradients and specialization patterns that are smoothly related to the regions’ relative market access. As an alternative, we formulate a ‘Comecon hypothesis’, according to which wages and se...

Price dynamics in Indian cities were examined using cointegration analysis. We identified and calculated a common trend for prices in 25 major cities in India. Impulse response functions were obtained to calculate the rates of convergence to the prices and we found that the half-life of any shock is very small for Indian cities. Although a close to three-month half-life seems too fast, there is...

The objective of the paper is to explore and give an overview of two central policy alternatives to improve the integration between the European Union and developing countries by removing barriers to trade: trade preferences and trade facilitation. After reviewing the relevant literatures and discussing the issues which constitute problems or opportunities for practitioners and researchers in b...

Recent research has underlined the efficiency of the GATT/WTO rules from the standpoint of politically motivated governments, emphasizing that the current multilateral rules are capable of delivering a politically efficient equilibrium. Such an equilibrium is, however, economically inefficient. Global free trade, in particular, is generally unattainable even in a fully cooperative world, provid...

The authors provide evidence on the impact of foreign ownership on labor market outcomes analyzing pay differences between foreign-acquired and domestically owned firms. For this purpose, they use firm-level data from 16 European countries over the time period 1999–2006. Combing propensity score matching techniques with difference-in-differences (DID) estimators the authors estimate positive wa...

In global markets, the market shares of the two or three biggest firms sum up more than 90 percent and firms do marketing efforts. However, the classical neo-walrasiano theoretical framework only is able to justify these stylized facts with particular firms’ cost structures, being one reason the presumption that there are no information costs. Towards the rationalization of those stylized facts...

We study how the 2007-2009 crisis has changed the impact of financial integration on the transmission of international business cycles, focusing on a sample of 20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009. We use a differences-in-differences strategy for identification and investigate the effect of bilateral financial linkages on the co-movement of output, investment, and consumption before and...

Globalization and Labor Market Outcomes: Wage Bargaining, Search Frictions, and Firm Heterogeneity We introduce search unemployment à la Pissarides into Melitz’ (2003) model of trade with heterogeneous firms. We allow wages to be individually or collectively bargained and analytically solve for the equilibrium. We find that the selection effect of trade influences labor market outcomes. Trade l...

The ethnic composition of US inventors is undergoing a signi…cant transformation — with deep impacts for the overall agglomeration of US innovation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual US patent records to explore these trends with greater detail. The contributions of Chinese and Indian scientists and engineers to US technology formation increase dramatically in the 1990s. ...