This paper studies the costs and benefits of the adoption of the policy of free movement for workers. For the countries to agree on uncontrolled movement of workers, the short run costs must be outweighed by the long term benefits that result from better labor market flexibility and income...

It is now a commonplace that the unfunded public pension systems of many OECD countries will run into severe financing problems in the coming decades due to a dramatically increasing pensioner/worker ratio. While this diagnosis is completely undisputed, there is still a vigorous debate on the...

This paper studies the social desirability of agglomeration and the efficiency arguments for policy intervention in a simple, analytically solvable 'new economic geography' model with two trade integrating regions. The location pattern emerging as market equilibrium is bubbleshapedʺ, i.e. it...

In this paper we aim to trace the roots of the ongoing economic mayhem and to unmask the chorus of the tragedy which plays on the world stage. The main thesis of our work is that, despite the triumphant rhetoric praising the merits of perfect competition, the global fields of the dysfunctional...

Academic macroeconomics and the research department of central banks have come to be dominated by Dynamic, Stochastic, General Equilibrium (DSGE) models based on micro-foundations of optimising representative agents with rational expectations. We argue that the dominance of this particular sort...

Conflicting views about the degree of long-run mobility across multiple generations persist because direct empirical evidence is scarce. Predictions are instead routinely derived by iteration of intergenerational measures, a procedure which implies high long-run mobility even when...

We consider an artificial population of forward looking heterogeneous agents making decisions between schooling, employment, employment with training and household production, according to a behavioral model calibrated to a large set of stylized facts. Some of these agents are subject to policy...

"According to the "compensation theory", market forces should assure a complete compensation of the initial labour-saving impact of process innovations. In this paper a critique of this approach is proposed through a detailed survey of the theoretical and empirical literature on the subject. The...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of refugee migration, with emphasis on the current refugee crisis. After first reviewing the institutional framework laid out by the Geneva Convention for Refugees, we demonstrate that, despite numerous attempts at developing a common European asylum...

In Europe, the competence for social security and the right to levy income tax lie with the country of employment in cross-border matters. This has two disadvantages. First, the Employment Principle distorts active persons' choice of place of work. Second, the employment-based regulation of...