The model developed in this paper illustrates how grade repetition and unemployment shocks may culminate in a skill gap and consequently a wage gap across races. I calibrate the model to South African data in the early 1990s, and use this calibrated model to provide insight into the quantitative...

Previous studies generally find mixed empirical evidence on the relationship between government spending and economic growth. In this paper, we re-examine the causal relationship between government expenditure and economic growth by conducting the panel Granger causality test recently developed...

Welfare policy has been controversial and support is often drawn along political affiliation lines, the economic return of investment in welfare programs is frequently cited as a justification for new and expanded policies. To investigate the direct and indirect effects of welfare programs on...

We look at how well several alternative Taylor-rule specifications describe Federal Reserve policy decisions in real time, using the newly developed Giacomini and Rossi (2007) test for non-nested model selection in the presence of (possible) parameter instability. Further, we isolate those...

Examined in the present study is the extent to which inequality influences the effectiveness of income growth in poverty reduction, based on 1990s data for a sample of African economies. An analysis-of-covariance model is derived and estimated, with the headcount, gap, and squared gap poverty...

This study explores the process of firms' participation in financial subsidies supporting outward foreign direct investments. Policy makers should be concerned about the existence of self-selection mechanisms among eligible firms as they could fail to reach the target population. Using...

The scope and complexity of international trading arrangements in the Middle East, as well as their spotty historical record of success, underscore the urgent need for an adequate understanding of the relative costs and benefits of participation in preferential trading arrangements and, more...

This study measures the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy on regional house prices in Sweden 1991-2002. We use a multivariate persistent shock metric to examine the impact of short-term interest rate on the property market. We also segregate the influence of interest rate shocks and...

We use a calibrated general equilibrium model with heterogeneous labor and search to evaluate the quantitative effects of various labor tax cut scenarios. The focus is on skill heterogeneity combined with downward wage rigidities at the low end of the skill ladder. Workers can take jobs for...

This paper investigates the impact of international shocks - interest rate, commodity price and industrial production shocks - on key macroeconomic variables in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries by using near-VAR models and monthly data from the early 1990s to 2009. In contrast to...