This paper traces the origins of World Bank indicators of debt distress and their employment as HIPC sustainability targets. These targets are interpreted as ‘switching values’, below which countries are (on average) expected to avoid debt service problems, but as such, they do not take into...

A strong representation of a committee, formalized as a simple game, on a convex and closed set of alternatives is a game form with the members of the committee as players such that (i) the winning coalitions of the simple game are exactly those coalitions, which can get any given alternative...

The paper discusses methodological questions related to econometric time-series modelling of I(2) data. Long-run and medium-run relationships between two general price indices, the US CPI and WPI and four commodity prices indices, the WBI, CRBI, GSCI, and ECI are investigated in a multivariate...

We study the sources of long-run growth and wage gap in a North-South (N-S) model with trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). Although R&D is the engine of global growth, increased share of R&D spending need not be accompanied by higher growth rate, and vice versa. Although, investment is...

This paper studies two-stage bargaining in a simple general equilibrium model with a dual labour market. We analyse the case where agreements reached at the central level in the unionized sector extend beyond this sector, which seems to be a characteristic feature of continental European labour...

The authors characterize the interplay between firms' decisions in terms of either horizontal or vertical product differentiation and their ensuing price behavior, be that collusive or not. They prove the existence of a non-monotone relationship between firms' decisions at the development stage...

In this paper we analyze the welfare properties of the set of Drèze equilibria for economies with incomplete markets and firms. The well known fact that a Drèze equilibrium need not be constrained Pareto optimal is often attributed to a lack of coordination between firms. We show that there...

The recurrent issues of "non-robustness" and "scale effects" are discussed within a unified framework for the presentation of different generations of innovation-based growth models. With a certain proviso robust innovation-based growth models tend to end up with the long-run per capita growth...

This paper deals with dynamic adjustment in large economies to changes in the rate of capital income taxation or in the rate of investment tax credit in one country. The framework applied in the paper is a continuous-time, overlapping generations model with two countries. It features population...

This paper examines the real cost of disinflation in an economy with high and uncertain inflation. The private sector writes contracts in which wages are indexed to a lagged price index and the exchange rate ("dollarization"). Contracts of fixed and endogenously determined lengths are...