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...

Two sentiments are common among economists who study state and local public finance—that source-based capital taxation by subnational governments is a bad idea, and that state governments are powerless to redistribute income. These claims are consistent with the optimal tax literature, if the...

The Chinese grain policy reforms were implemented in 1994. The grain price subsidies were eliminated which led to a substantial grain price increase. This paper examines the welfare changes associated with the grain policy reforms. All welfare measures unambiguously show that the consumers...

This study examines Taiwan’s monetary policy reaction function based on an extended Taylor rule including the exchange rate, the stock price, and the lagged interest rate. The VAR model is employed to consider simultaneous relations among the endogenous variables. Two major monetary policy...

The IS-LM model, as a vehicle for policy analysis, has a substantial influence on the policy makers and academicians. Like the developed countries, the IS-LM framework remains important for students to learn in the developing countries because of the benefits it offers in clarifying their...

This paper determines the effect that offset payments under the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act (CDSOA also known as the “Byrd Amendment”) have on tariff levels that are lobbied for by U.S. producer groups. We derive the optimum antidumping tariff that would maximize the welfare of...