The Real Business Cycle (RBC) research program has grown spectacularly over the last decade, as its concepts and methods have diffused into mainstream macroeconomics. Yet, there is increasing skepticism that technology shocks are a major source of business fluctuations. This chapter exposits the...

Interest in economic policy and performance in Iran under the Islamic Republic remains vigorous two decades after the Revolution. Since 1979, Iran has undergone important socio-economic and institutional changes and has been affected by significant economic and political upheavals. This paper...

We develop a dynamic political-economic theory of welfare state and immigration policies, featuring three distinct voting groups: skilled workers, unskilled workers, and old retirees. The essence of inter - and intra-generational redistribution of a typical welfare system is captured with a...

Traditional approaches to separate the underlying trend of potential output from cyclical developments mostly rely on the concept of nonaccelerating inflation output and are thus unable to detect upswings caused by the financial cycle, which often appear to be unsustainable in the long run. In...

This paper develops a model of unemployment fluctuations. The model keeps the architecture of the Barro and Grossman (1971) general disequilibrium model but replaces the disequilibrium framework on the labor and product markets by a matching framework. On the product and labor markets, both...

We analyse the key characteristics of simple models of overlapping generations where capital is endogenous, and money plays norole. The main focus is on the codyamics of interest rates, wages, and consumption with capital.

This paper attempts to identify, in a framework deliberately stripped of unnecessary technicalities, some of the basic reasons why adaptative learning may or may not lead to stability and convergence to self-fulfilling expectations in large socioeconomic systems where no agent, or collection of...

This paper examines the cyclical properties of a finance constrained economy populated by two classes of households with heterogeneous preferences and featuring social increasing returns-to-scale. The model exhibits indeterminacy for externalities mild enough so that the labor demand curve is...