This paper analyses the impact of the skill composition of migration flows on the host country's labour market in a specific-factors-two-sector model with heterogeneous labour (low-, medium-, and high-skilled). We assume price-setting behaviour in both manufacturing and services sectors. The...

If government revenues from a flat-rate income tax are spent on public factors and public factors are used for human capital production and human capital is used for the production of technical progress, then a higher rate of taxation will lead to a higher rate of technical progress if steady...

This paper, in its second part, adds the lacking theoretical underpinnings to the literature on exports and growth. It attempts to demonstrate why most of the theoretical analyses of the terms of trade phenomenon has been inadequate from the development point of view. It then presents in its...

We derive several cases of 'comparative advantage in nothing', which can be relevant for East Germany. The simplest case with little relevance is the HO assumption of identical technologies across regions implanted into the Ricardian model. The second is the case with full employment wages...

Studies on central bank reaction functions find that central banks only caring about inflation stability, like the ECB, seem to follow a standard Taylor rule in the sense that the interest rate reacts significantly to variations in the output gap. We explain this result by claiming that the...

Recent empirical work has shown that ongoing international financial integration facilitates cross-country consumption risk-sharing. While these studies typically employ absolutemeasures to account for a country''s integration in international capital markets, we devise a relative measure that...

We model a three-pillar pension system and analyse in this context the impact of the financial crisis on the aggregate economy, using an overlapping generations model where individuals live for two periods. The system consists of (1) a PAYG pension system, (2) a Defined Benefit pension fund, and...

Standard New Keynesian models cannot generate the widely observed result that private consumption is crowded in by government spending. We use a New Keynesian endogenous growth model with endogenous labour supply to analyse this phenomenon. The presence of small direct productivity effects of...

Unprecedented growth in private cross-border asset trade and asymmetric internationalbalance sheets are well-documented stylized facts of financial integration. Moreover, weobserve that current accounts are no longer the number one determinant of external balances. Advancing the work of...

In this paper we document the growing dispersion of external and internal balances between countries in the North and South of the Euro area over the time period 1992 to 2007. We find a persistent divergence process that seems to have started with the introduction of the common currency and has...