An economy's production set is the collection of all net output vectors that the economy is capable of producing with a given technology and fixed quantities of primary factors of production. The boundary of this set is called the production possibility frontier or PPF. We show that, if the...

Egypt started a recent judicial reform program in 2007, which can be considered the first ever since the establishment of the National Egyptian Judicial System in 1952. It focuses mainly on solving organizational problems within First Instance Courts (FIC), as they form the active cell of the...

Business tendency survey indicators are widely recognized as a key instrument for business cycle forecasting. Their leading indicator property is assessed with regard to forecasting industrial production in Russia and Germany. For this purpose, vector autoregressive (VAR) models are specified...

This paper studies the short-run macroeconomic effects of legislated tax changes in Germany using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Identification of the tax shock follows the narrative approach recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010). Results indicate a moderate, but statistically...

Regional labor markets are characterized by huge disparities of unemployment rates. Models of the New Economic Geography explain how disparities of regional goods markets endogenously arise but usually assume full employment. This paper discusses regional unemployment disparities by introducing...

Domestic climate policy emissions trading schemes appear to be spreading all over the word. However, carbon markets in existence often suffer from dilution in terms of ecological effectiveness, economic efficiency, and social justice. Thus, in order to firmly base carbon markets on the main...

This paper characterizes, under the most general conditions to date, the steady-state equilibria of a symmetric, two-country trade model in which countries move in alternating-move, dynamic either tariffsetting or quota-setting games in Markov Perfect strategies, and compares the respective...

The share of renewable energies in the electricity sector ('green' electricity production) relative to overall electricity supply has been growing steadily over the last years in most industrialized countries. This expansion was due to economic support either by subsidies or quota requirements...

This paper investigates how FOMC members revise their forecasts for key macroeconomic variables. Based on a new data set of forecasts from individual FOMC members between 1992 and 2000 it is shown that FOMC members intentionally overrevise their forecasts at the first revision and underrevise at...

This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making...