Does a country?s level of unemployment have an impact on the long-run growth rate? Incorporating unemployment into a generalised augmented Solow-type growth model, yields some answers to this question. In particular, we show that the impact of unemployment on productivity growth heavily depends...

Using a large panel of administrative records this study confirms the predictions of the ranking model of Blanchard and Diamond (1994) that an individual?s probability of leaving unemployment decreases with unemployment duration and increases with economic growth. However, the ranking model of...

A model linking macroeconomic phenomena and income distribution in balanced growth equilibria is developed as a variant to the Kaldor model of factor shares. It departs from the original Kaldor model in assuming equal savings rates and production determined by a matching process between workers...

This paper analyzes the evolution of inequality in Poland during the economic transition that began in 1989-90. Using micro data from the Household Budget Surveys, we find that, after a brief spike in 1989, income and consumption inequality actually declined to below pretransition levels during...

The question whether international openness causes higher domestic growth has been subject to intense discussions in the empirical growth literature. This paper addresses this issue using the fall of the Berlin wall in 1990 as a natural experiment. We analyze whether the slow-down in convergence...

It is obvious that the German economy exhibits a significant decline in economic growth during the last two decades. Although the German economy has still to overcome the burden of the reunification in 1990 it is shown that this burden might be only one reason of this decline. In this study we...

Many theoretical models show that redistribution causes low growth or capital outflows even though empirically redistribution and growth are often found to be positively associated across countries. This paper argues that tax competition and the danger of capital outflows leads optimizing...

In this paper we study the impact of the income distribution on innovation through the demand for quality goods. For simplicity, we assume that there are two types of consumers, rich and poor. The income distribution is measured by the population share of the poor and the relative income of the...

Dictatorship is the predominant political system in many developing countries. However, different dictators act quite differently: a good dictator implements growth-enhancing economic policies, e.g. investment in public education and infrastructure, whereas a bad dictator expropriates wealth of...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between a country?s wealth inequality and economic growth is ambiguous. This paper provides reasonable explanations of this ambiguity. We investigate the implications which the shape of wealth distribution has for economic growth in a framework combining...