Social protection in industrial countries has been provided through regulations, tax expenditures, and public spending. This paper argues that globalization will affect governments’ ability to continue providing this social protection at the level of recent decades. Specifically, tax...

Advanced economies are in the midst of a major demographic transition, with the number of elderly rising precipitously relative to the working-age population. Yet, despite the acceleration in demographic shifts in the past decade, advanced economies experienced markedly different trajectories in...

Several recent empirical studies have examined determinants of economic growth using country average (cross-section) data. In contrast, this paper employs a technique for using a panel of both cross-section and time-series data for 98 industrial and developing countries over 1960-85 to determine...

The time-series properties of real exchange rates, on a number of definitions, for 22 industrial countries during 1979-95 were used to re-examine whether PPP holds. It is shown that if real exchange rates reverted to a constant mean slowly, say by five percent a month, then at standard levels of...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the degree of nominal wage flexibility in a sample of nineteen industrial countries. Across countries, aggregate uncertainty increases the degree of wage flexibility in the face of various shocks. Wage flexibility stabilizes fluctuations in real...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the medium-term determinants of current accounts for a large sample of industrial and developing countries. The analysis is based on a structural approach that highlights the roles of the fundamental macroeconomic determinants of saving and...

The paper examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending is higher in...

This paper examines the role of long-run monetary and cyclical factors in determining exchange rate movements. Results of empirical study using a data set that includes Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States support the view that exchange rate movements can be...

This paper examines the impact of rising trade and financial integration on international business cycle comovement among a large group of industrial and developing countries. The results provide at best limited support for the conventional wisdom that globalization has increased the degree of...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between reservation wages of unemployed workers and macroeconomic factors--including the unemployment rate and generosity of the unemployment compensation system--as well as individual-specific determinants, such as human capital...