A natural experiment with an exchange-rate band in Austria-Hungary in the early 20th century provides a rare opportunity to discuss critical aspects of the theory of target zones. Providing a new derivation of the target zone model as a set of nested hypotheses, the inference is drawn that...

This paper analyzes the long-run effect of monetary policy when credit constraints are taken into account. This analysis is carried on in a heterogeneous agents framework in which infinitely lived agents can partially self-insure against income risks by using both financial assets and real...

A consumption tax amounts to exempt savings from taxation. As such, it would have important distributional effects, first of all from the poor to the rich, but also towards capital intensive industries; and intergenerational, away from the very young (students) and the old. For what concerns...

This paper provides a new methodology to map international monetary relations in the 19th century. We identify an index of international liquidity and, applying techniques borrowed from formal network analysis (in particular, blockmodelling) we produce a formal ranking of currencies according to...

This paper analyses the welfare implications of international spillovers related to productivity gains, changes in market size, or government spending. We introduce trade costs and endogenous varieties in a two-country general-equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, drawing a...

OECD countries faced largely divergent employment rates during the last decades. But the whole bulk of the cross-national and cross-temporal heterogeneity relies on specific demographic groups: prime-age women and younger and older individuals. This paper argues that family labour supply...

La thèse s'articule autour de deux idées principales : d'une part la mobilité du travail constitue un mécanisme d'ajustement essentiel en régime de change fixe ; d'autre part, le développement des politiques sociales contribue à ralentir le processus d'émigration. L'argumentation...

This paper analyses some of the theoretical and empirical arguments that serve to legitimate regional policies in Europe. We start by reviewing the existing evidence that European integration has led to a process of convergence between countries but not between regions inside countries and...

The analysis of agricultural liberalization reveals very large potential gains for both developed and developing countries that will come especially from own-country liberalization as well as from inter-country trade, significant benefits that may be realized by the poorest developing countries,...

We study the dynamics of firm size in a repeated Cournot game with unkown demand function.We model the firm as a type of artificial neural network. Each period it must learn to map environmental signals to both demand parameters and its rival’s output choice. But this learning game is in the...