The weak government argument claims that fractionalized governments (coalition or minority governments) have more difficulty increasing their tax revenues or decreasing their spending than majority governments. This implies that weaker governments are associated with higher government deficits....

This paper studies the implications of parameter estimation uncertainty on the central banker behaviour. It first describes the optimal monetary policy rule obtained by the linear quadratic stochastic control approach. The treatment of parameter estimation uncertainty is covered by the...

This article provides a look at business concentration for sales and assets for the period 1967 to 2002 based on Theil’s entropy, a measure adopted by several authors in earlier publications. For contrast, three other well-known measures of concentration, the Hirschman-Herfindahl (HHI) index...

We estimate five VAR models and use generalized impulse response functions to examine the relationship between output and unemployment at the regional level. Further, within regions we consider the degree to which the cyclical nature of unemployment might vary across race and gender groups. We...

In the popular media, trade is quite often being used as a whipping boy and blamed for increased worldwide inequality. Is trade actually a source of greater income inequality around the world? What does the data show? Is there any reason to suspect trade as a major villain on the international...