The Mortensen-Pissarides model is an attractive model because it is tractable, delivers some intuitive comparative statics and permits policy analysis. However, Shimer (2005) shows that the model generates far too little volatility in its key variables - unemployment and vacancies - relative to...

This paper challenges the consensus on the nature of unemployment dynamics in Britain. We show that the argument that changes in unemployment arise mostly from changes in the duration of unemployment (rather than in the chance of becoming unemployed) is flawed. In fact, while shocks to the...

This paper uses the search and matching framework to explore the impact of employed job search on the labour market. We allow for endogenous employed job search, endogenous job destruction and heterogenous job creation. Job flows and workers flows do not coincide as we allow for job-to-job...

This paper argues that much interpretation of standard poverty data is flawed. It is common to analyse poverty data broken down by household or economic status. Implicitly it is assumed that people move between different states (for example, single, married, children, no children, etc.) for...

We consider auctions where bidders care about the reputational effects of their bidding and argue that the amount of information that is disclosed at the end of the auction will influence bidding. Our analysis focuses on several bid disclosure rules that capture all of the realistic cases. We...

We estimate a non-linear and discontinuous relationship between the tax level and the degree of alignment between the legislature and the governor, measured as the number of seats in the legislature that belong to the governor’s party. In the states with the line-item veto, there is a jump in...

We examine whether structural transformation leads to a Kuznets curve. We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers, occupational self-selection and selective migration, and calibrate the model to survey data for Malawi. We show that structural transformation raises...

For many developing countries, international transfers are now a significant source of income. These transfers include official development aid, private charitable donations, and personal remittances. This paper uses dynamic one-sector and multi-sector models to isolate conditions under which...

This study examines the long-run relationship between the real world price of maize, soybeans and sugar with the real world price of crude oil and a series of macroeconomic variables using a cointegration analysis from January 1982 until December 2012. The main empirical results support a strong...

This paper proposes a small-scale general equilibrium model of structural transformation with an urban labour market characterized by search frictions. The model is used to investigate the role of sectoral TFPs as main drivers of structural change and a new growth accounting exercise gives a...