We study a political economy model of entry barriers. Each period the policymaker determines whether to impose a high barrier to entry, and the special interest groups try to influence the policymaker's decision. Entry is accompanied by creative destruction - when many new firms enter, old firms...

Generous early retirement provisions account for a large proportion of the drop in the labor force participation of elderly workers. The aim of this paper is to provide a positive theory of early retirement. We suggest that the political support for generous early retirement provisions relies...

Can the initial distribution of land, in a country's early history, affect its subsequent economic development? In this paper, I show that when land ownership is sufficiently concentrated, the landed elite will lobby the government to raise barriers to industrialization in order to protect its...

This paper examines how political constraints can shape the social security system under different demographics. A steady state mapping between relevant economic and demographic variables and the social security tax rate resulting from a majority voting is provided. I calibrate an OLG model to...

Private ownership of land has been stressed in the development literature as key to increasing productivity in the agricultural sector. The beneficiaries of the redistributive land reforms undertaken in many Latin American countries, however, did not receive the individual property right of the...

Credit supply and demand changes are mostly unobserved, thus identifying completely the transmission of monetary policy through the credit channel is unfeasible. Bank lending surveys by central banks, however, contain reliable quarterly information on changes in loan conditions due to bank, firm...

This paper introduces Heckscher-Ohlin trade features into a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, and studies the international transmission of productivity shocks through trade in goods. This framework improves upon existing international real business cycle models in that...

This paper develops a real business cycle model characterized by idiosyncratic employment shocks and quantitatively explores the behavior of aggregate variables under the assumptions of complete and incomplete insurance markets. The results show that the model with incomplete markets produces...

Previous work of monetary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal rigidity a la Taylor, particularly the Cho-Cooley model, was abandoned in favor of the New-Keynesian analysis due to the model's failure to deliver business cycle statistics that match the U.S. economy along...