This paper shows that electoral incentives affect the occurrence of trade disputes. Focusing on WTO disputes filed by the United States during the 1995-2012 period, we show that U.S. presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re-election date. Moreover, disputes...

Motivated the European debt crisis, we construct a tractable theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms under limited commitment. The government of a sovereign country which has fallen into a recession of an uncertain duration issues one-period debt and can renege on its obligations by...

We study a two-stage sequential search model with two agents who compete for one job. The agents arrive sequentially, each one in a different stage. The agents' abilities are private information and they are derived from heterogeneous distribution functions. In each stage the designer chooses an...

The issue of model uncertainty is central to the empirical study of economic growth. Many recent papers use Bayesian Model Averaging to address model uncertainty, but Ciccone and Jarocinski (2010) have questioned the approach on theoretical and empirical grounds. They argue that a standard...

This paper uses a New Keynesian framework to study the coordination of fiscal and monetary policies, in response to an inflation shock when the policymaker acts with commitment. We first show that, in the simplest New Keynesian model, fiscal policy plays no part in the optimal policy response,...

This paper studies a simple New-Keynesian model of fiscal and monetary policy coordination when the policymaker acts under commitment. With a New Keynesian Phillips curve it is optimal to control inflation only through the use of monetary policy. But, when price-setters use a Steinsson (2003)...

Despite intense scrutiny estimates of the government spending multiplier remain highly uncertain with values ranging from 0.5 to 2. While a fiscal consolidation is generally assumed to have the same (mirror-image) effect as a fiscal expansion, we show that relaxing this assumption is crucial to...

This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases...

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting...

A distinct feature of China’s privatization is that both its design and its implementation are highly decentralized and are administered by the local governments. Based on a survey of 3,000 firms in over 100 Chinese cities, this paper studies how city governments choose among various...