What are the impacts on household incomes of the major economic downturn that occurred in almost all OECD countries starting in late 2007? This paper is a condensed version of a public lecture given at the University of Melbourne in honour of R. I. Downing. It draws on a study of 21 rich countries using data from national accounts, household surveys, and other sources. The headline findings are...

We examine optimal taxation and social insurance with adverse selection in competitive insurance markets. In the previous literature, it has been shown that, with perfect insurance markets, social insurance improves welfare since it is able to redistribute without creating distortions. This result has been taken as robust to the introduction of adverse selection as this would only provide addit...

The purpose of this study is to provide a macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy in the Czech Republic during the transformation period 1989-1995. In contrast to those studies which are based on “decline accounting”, disentangling different factors from each other and ascribing to them specific roles in the overall decline, this study focuses exclusively on fiscal policy and tries to identify ...

This paper studies an unusually rich data set of all the 1473 applications to the NSF in economics during 1985-1990. This dataset is unusual in that one can observe the characteristics of the scientists whose application was accepted (414 applications in our sample) as well as of those whose applications were rejected. We estimate the effect of an NSF grants on the research output (quality-adju...

An Empirical Analysis of Trade-Related Redistribution and the Political Viability of Free Trade Even if free trade creates net welfare gains for a country as a whole, the associated distributional implications can undermine the political viability of free trade. We show that trade-related redistribution increases the political viability of free trade in the US. We do so by assessing the causal ...

α-Synuclein (αS) is an amyloidogenic intrinsically disordered protein implicated in Parkinson's disease, for which copper-mediated pathways of neurodegeneration have been suggested. We have employed nuclear magnetic resonance, circular dichroism, electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, and thioflavin T fluorescence to characterize interactions of Cu(2+) with the physiological acetylated form...

ABSTRACT Past studies have shown that changes in the house price of a region may transmit to its neighbouring regions. The transmission mechanism may follow spatial and temporal diffusion processes. This paper investigates such regional housing market dynamics and interactions among local housing sub-markets in Taipei. The analysis is based on a panel data framework and spatial panel models usi...

This paper discusses a number of questions with regard to Sweden’s economic and political development: • How did Sweden become rich? • What explains Sweden’s high level of income equality? • What were the causes of Sweden’s problems from 1970 to 1995? • How is it possible that Sweden, since the crisis of the early 1990s, is growing faster than most EU countries despite its high taxes and genero...

This article combines all available data to produce pretax and post-tax income inequality series in 26 European countries from 1980 2017. Our estimates are consistent with macroeconomic growth comparable US distributional national accounts. Inequality grew nearly countries, but much less than the US. Contrary a widespread view, we demonstrate that Europe’s lower levels cannot be explained by mo...