Slower growth of the labour force and an increase in old-age dependency will reduce the growth of aggregate output and output per capita in many developed countries. However, a major question is whether there is any systematic link between demographics and the productivity of those who will...

Over the next four decades, increasing old-age dependency ratios exert an enormous upward pressure on welfare spending in most developed countries. As this is mainly due to existing unfunded public pension schemes, many countries have embarked on far-reaching reforms in this area, strengthening...

In this paper we examine financial interactions between tiers of government. Whilst most existing empirical evidence has focused on the US, it is difficult to generalize conclusions obtained to countries where the position and remit of lower tiers of government is evolving or is less clear...

This paper presents a simple model in which debt management stabilizes the debt-to-GDP ratio in face of shocks to real returns and output growth and thus supports fiscal restraint in ensuring sustainability. The optimal composition of public debt is derived by looking at the relative impact of...

We discuss metrics of globalization for individual economies as distance measures between fully integrated and trade restricted equilibria in economies initially operating under less than full integration with the global economy. Such metrics can be used to construct country globalization...

Using annual data on nine manufacturing sectors of eighteen OECD countries, the article studies the implications of market structure for cross-country relative price variability. It is found that, in accordance with predictions from a standard markup pricing model, reductions in market...

In this paper we construct a Ricardian model of trade in vertically-differentiated products between a developing country and the (developed) rest of the world. Despite labour being the only factor of production in this model, tariffs (in addition to income taxes) have distributional consequences...

I argue that the offsetting effect of social security contributions on household retirement saving depends on how closely the social security programme imitates a private retirement saving plan (i.e. the ?actuarial? component of the social security programme) – the closer the design of the...

This paper re-examines the relationship between trade intensity and business cycle synchronization for 21 OECD countries during 1970-2003. Instead of using instrumental variables, we estimate a multivariate model including variables capturing specialisation, financial integration, and similarity...