This paper studies the association between the current account and real estate valuation across countries, subject to data availability [43 countries, of which 25 are OECD], during 1990 - 2005. We find robust and strong positive association between current account deficits and the appreciation...

This paper argues that mainstream economics does not follow the positivist research tradition it (often implicitly) claims to follow and expresses some serious doubt that econometrics in particular can make economics a hard science. Mathematical rigour and sophisticated statistical techniques...

Freeman (2006) suggested that auctioning immigration visas and redistributing the revenue to native residents in the host country would increase migration from low-income to high-income countries. The effect of the auctioning of immigration visas, in the Ricardian model from Findlay (1982), on...

We use the method of indirect inference to test a full open economy model of the UK that has been in forecasting use for three decades. The test establishes, using a Wald statistic, whether the parameters of a time-series representation estimated on the actual data lie within some confidence...

In this paper we show that in a two sector economy with heterogeneous agents and competitive markets, in a steady state the optimal capital income tax rate is in general different from zero. The optimal tax policy in this setting depends on the relative price difference. In a two sector economy...

The explanation of velocity in neoclassical monetary business cycle models relies on a goods productivity shocks to mimic the dataís procyclic velocity feature; money shocks are not important; and the Önancial sector plays no role. This paper sets the model within endogenous growth, adds...

The result of Colombo and Labrecciosa [Colombo, Luca and Labrecciosa, Paola (2006). 'The suboptimality of optimal punishments in Cournot supergames', Economics Letters 90, pp. 116-121.] that optimal punishments are inferior to Nash-reversion trigger strategies with decreasing marginal costs is...

We develop the Generalized Taylor Economy (GTE) in which there are many sectors with overlapping contracts of di§erent lengths. In economies with the same average contract length, monetary shocks will be more persistent when longer contracts are present. Using the Bils-Klenow distribution of...

We extend the celebrated Chamley-Judd result of zero capital income tax and show that the steady state optimal capital income tax is nonzero, in general. In particular, we find that the optimal plan involves zero capital income tax in investment sector and a nonzero capital income tax in...