The equilibrium size of a nation state is, in part, the result of a trade-off between the gains from scale economies in the provision of public services and the costs of applying uniform policy to heterogeneous cultural, institutional, and geographical fundamentals. Changes in such fundamentals...

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...

The equilibrium size of a nation state is, in part, the result of a trade-off between the gains from scale economies in the provision of public services and the costs of applying uniform policy to heterogeneous cultural, institutional, and geographical fundamentals. Changes in such fundamentals...

We focus on the link between political instability due to uncertain electoral outcomes and economic growth, through the impact on a government's decisions on how to allocate government expenditure between public consumption and investment. Using an endogenous growth model with partisan electoral...

We assess the role of national fiscal policies, as automatic stabilizers, within a monetary union. We use a two-country New Keynesian DGE model which incorporates non-Ricardian consumers (as in Gal? et al. 2004) and a home bias in the composition of national consumption bundles. We find that...

This paper investigates whether the higher prevalence of South multinational enterprises (MNEs) in risky developing countries may be explained by the experience that they have acquired of poor institutional quality at home. We confirm the intuition provided by our analytical model by empirically...

We set up a trade model where three countries compete for an exogenous number of firms. Our innovation lies in the geography of the model. Of the three countries, one is the hub through which all trade takes place. First, we establish the natural geography of the region, which is given by the...

This paper analyses the impact of asymmetric preferences with respect to inflation and output by policymakers on interest-rate reaction functions and test for their existence. A modified New Keynesian framework which makes it possible to identify the dominant type of asymmetry is developed and...

We estimate forward-looking interest-rate reaction functions for the G3 economies and for a group of countries which recently adopted inflation targets. Some significant shifts in the conduct of monetary policy are detected in the G3 countries, especially in the US A and Japan. In contrast with...

This paper estimates VAR models to examine the response of monetary and fiscal policy to macroeconomic targets, and the interdependence between the two policy instruments. The models are estimated for a number of G7 countries. Our findings show that, whilst monetary and fiscal policy are...