The importance of output gap and its timely measure come from the fact that it can serve as a guide to macroeconomic policy design. The knowledge of the position of an economy in a cycle is invaluable information and it has an important role in formulation of monetary, fiscal, and income...

This paper discusses welfare costs of a decrease in productivity and argues that there are two important channels which cause a reduction in welfare: a decrease in output per firm (intensive margin) and a decrease in number of operating firms (extensive margin). Traditional Dixit-Stiglitz...

This paper incorporates learning and reputation building into a simple dynamic stochastic model of international trade with asymmetric information. We use the model to study a bilateral trade flow influenced significantly by learning and reputation, namely U.S. imports of Japanese cars over the...

Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) predicts a monotonic relation between productivity and markups. When including revenue taxes, however, this relation is non-monotonic and depends on taxes. Even without taxes, productivity and markups can be non-monotonic depending on how non-homotheticity is modeled.

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion motivates individuals to engage in...

Studies in family economics and anthropology suggest that grandmothers are a highly valuable source of childcare assistance. As such, availability of grandmothers affects the cost of having children, and hence fertility decisions of young parents. In this paper, we develop a simple model to...

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion requires that individuals make financial...

This paper incorporates learning and reputation building into a simple dynamic stochastic model with asymmetric information. We use the model to study a bilateral trade flow influenced significantly by learning and reputation, namely U.S. imports of Japanese cars over the period 1961–2004....

Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion motivates individuals to engage in...