This paper investigates whether official Japanese intervention in the JPY/USD exchange rate over the January 1999 to March 2004 time period is effective. By integrating the official intervention data with a comprehensive set of newswire reports capturing days on which there is a rumor or...

This paper discusses the principles and practices of dual income taxation in the Nordic countries. The first part of the paper explains the rationale and the historical background for the introduction of the dual income tax and describes the current Nordic tax practices. The second part of the...

The theory of optimal taxation has often been criticized for being of little practical policy relevance, due to a lack of robust theoretical results. This paper argues that recent advances in optimal tax theory has made that theory easier to apply and may help to explain some current trends in...

This paper argues that growth theory needs a more general notion of "regularity" than that of exponential growth. We suggest that paths along which the rate of decline of the growth rate is proportional to the growth rate itself deserve attention. This opens up for considering a richer set of...

We measure the contribution of firm-specific effects to overall sales variation within a destination and find it remarkably low. Our empirical decomposition is structurally motivated by a heterogeneity model of exporting involving destination-specific, firm-specific, and...

In many organizations, decisions are taken by unanimity giving each member veto power. We analyze a model of an organization in which members with heterogenous productivity privately contribute to a common good. Under unanimity, the least efficient member imposes her preferred effort choice on...

If environmental quality positively affects the productivity of labor in R&D and pollution is caused by the use of a non-renewable resource, it is socially optimal to postpone extraction and to intertemporally adjust R&D effort.

We investigate the effects of both U.S. and Japanese news surprises, measured as the difference between macroeconomic announcements and preceding survey expectations, on the intraday JPY/USD exchange rate. No previous study has considered the intraday JPY/USD exchange rate responses to a broad...

This paper deals with the implications of factor demand linkages for monetary policy design. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with two sectors that produce durable and non-durable goods, respectively. Part of the output produced in each sector is used as an intermediate input of...

In this paper we study the functioning of representative democracy when politicians are better informed than the electorate about conditions relevant for policy choice. We consider a model with two states of the world. The distribution of voters' preferred policies shifts with the state. The two...