The Mortensen-Pissarides model is an attractive model because it is tractable, delivers some intuitive comparative statics and permits policy analysis. However, Shimer (2005) shows that the model generates far too little volatility in its key variables - unemployment and vacancies - relative to...

This paper uses the search and matching framework to explore the impact of employed job search on the labour market. We allow for endogenous employed job search, endogenous job destruction and heterogenous job creation. Job flows and workers flows do not coincide as we allow for job-to-job...

This paper argues that much interpretation of standard poverty data is flawed. It is common to analyse poverty data broken down by household or economic status. Implicitly it is assumed that people move between different states (for example, single, married, children, no children, etc.) for...

Using data on historical returns on international financial assets, the paper simulates pension fund and pension replacement ratios, building up frequency distributions of these ratios for individuals saving in a defined contribution pension plan in different countries. These frequency...

Focus - specialization and specific technology - improves productivity but leads to more dependency and opens a door for power problems. We analyze how organizational design and the choice of technology interact with the allocation of ownership in minimizing the holdup problem in the property...

This paper investigates why governments in some developing countries have adopted more liberal policies than others. To construct a composite policy index, the paper applies a robust principal components analysis to Washington Consensus policy variables. The paper shows that income growth is...

This paper shows how to calibrate a two-sector general equilibrium model of production using a small number of parameter assumptions and readily available data. The framework is then used to analyze the costs of labor market dualism. The paper quantiÞes the effects of rural-urban wage...

Using OECD quarterly data on consumption, output and investment from 1980, the balanced growth hypothesis is tested country by country for seven European economies, Belgium, Finland, France, Holland, Italy, Spain and the UK. Output series for each of the countries is then modelled as an output...

This paper studies the effect of market structure and macroeconomic uncertainty on the transmission of monetary policy. We motivate our analysis with a simple model which predicts that: 1) investment and production in more concentrated sectors are more affected by demand changes and 2) high...

We examine the view that high-quality macroeconomic policy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for economic growth. We first construct a new index of the quality of macroeconomic policy. We then directly compare growth rate distributions across countries with good and bad policies; use...