Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

The paper explores the implications for explaining the endogenous formation of jurisdictions of modelling the political process as a costly fight to acquire shares of the GNP pie. It is shown, in particular, that a system of federalism is especially significant in ameliorating distributional...

Nonnegativety constraints on the parameters of the GARCH (p, Q) model may be relaxed without giving up the requirement of the conditional variance remaining non- negative with probability one. This paper looks into the consequences of adopting these less severe constraints in the GARCH (2,2)...

In this paper, a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the unconditional fourth moment of the GARCH (p, q) process is given as well as an expression for the moment itself. Furthermore, the autocorrelation function of the centred and squared observations of this process is...

Is the role of government different in poor countries? We examine the government's role for growth in 40 LDCs with low infrastructure levels and limited access to capital. We consider both expenditure and financing aspects of government activity, but cannot conclude that governments in LDCs...

Within most organizations, agents may spend time on a variety of tasks, productive and redistributive. In this paper, I derive an optimal multi-task incentive scheme under the realistic assumption that agents have limited liability. The wage level is shown to increase with an agent's discretion...

In this paper a persuasion game is analyzed, where "persuasion" is understood as an interested party's acquisition and transmission of information to a decision maker. The model allows for many interpretations, e.g., political lobbying or influence activities in organizations. Individuals' ex...

In this paper fluctuations in prices of Swedish exports to five countries are investigated in order to test whether there are systematic differences between prices to different markets and whether relative export prices are systematically affected by macroeconomic conditions in destination...

This paper is a selective survey of new or recent methods to extract information about market expectations from asset prices for monetary policy purposes. Traditionally, interest rates and forward exchange rates have been used to extract expected means of future interest rates, exchange rates...

The present paper begins by outlining a theoretical, rational- choice approach to understanding how religious beliefs and affiliations might influence the behavior of individuals. This influence arises from an expectation that the god in question punishes certain forms of action and from social...