optimal interest rate rules asset prices and credit frictions we study optimal taylor type interest rate rules in an economy with credit market imperfections our analysis builds on the agency cost framework of carlstrom and fuerst 1997 agency costs net worth and business fluctuations a computable general equilibrium analysis american economic review 87 893 910 which we extend in two directions first we embed monopolistic competition and sticky prices second we modify the stochastic structure of the model in order to generate a countercyclical premium on external finance this is achieved by linking the mean distribution of investment opportunities faced by entrepreneurs to aggregate total factor productivity we model monetary policy in terms of simple welfare maximizing interest rate rules we find that monetary policy should respond to increases in asset prices by lowering interest rates however when monetary policy responds strongly to inflation the marginal welfare gain of responding to asset prices vanishes within the class of linear interest rate rules that we analyze a strong anti inflationary stance always attains the highest level of welfare

mexico and the brady plan mexico has throughout the 1980s been centre stage in the debates and events shaping the sovereign debt problem caught between a sudden collapse of its terms of trade and rising world interest rates mexico suspended debt service payments in august 1982 and ushered in what has since become known as the debt crisis in the following years lending to ldcs dried up and debtor countries were increasingly forced to run high trade surpluses to effect ever growing transfers from poor back to rich countries in the face of falling growth rates and rising inflation in the high debt countries then secretary of the treasury baker proposed the baker plan in return for economic reforms high debt countries would get new access to medium term new loans in addition to rolling over of amortization of old loans new loans had to come both from commercial creditors and the official lending institutions with access to capital markets restored the economic reforms would it was hoped allow the debtors to grow out of debt but experience in the high debt countries showed that the original hopes of the proponents of the baker plan went unfulfilled net transfers out of the borrowing countries went up rather than down as

involuntary unemployment in economies with efficient risk sharing abstract we study economies where employment lotteries determine random layoffs and incomes for employed and unemployed agents allocate risk efficiently we ask for which specifications are unemployed agents worse off a situation we call involuntary unemployment we show unemployed agents are worse off iff an exogenous increase in wealth decreases aggregate unemployment in a monetary economy we show that in equilibrium the unemployed are worse off iff high inflation implies high unemployment our model also generates nominal wage stickiness as an equilibrium phenomenon but neither involuntary unemployment nor nominal stickiness implies these economies are operating inefficiently or are out of equilibrium

a public choice model of trade union behaviour and membership it is commonly assumed in the microeconomic literature concerned with trade union behaviour that the union maximises an aggregate utility function defined over homogeneous individuals and that the level of membership is fixed the purpose of this paper is to relax these two assumptions it is suggested below that trade unions may usefully be treated as political organisations comprising heterogeneous individuals and that the effects of union wage policies on the level of membership should be explicitly incorporated into the model consider first the assumption that the union is a homogeneous organisation this is often a convenient simplification but observation of the behaviour and government of trade unions suggests it is hardly realistic trade unions in the united kingdom are large groups based on a complex organisational structure comprising an executive a shop steward system and a body of rank and file members once the union is considered as a complex organisation the question arises as to how members preferences are transmitted through the hierarchical levels each of which may have conflicting aims there are two polar theoretical approaches to this question in the industrial relations literature clegg i980 at one extreme unions are seen as oligarchies unresponsive to members wishes full time officials it is argued secure a monopoly of power to stay in office with the assistance of low membership participation and apathy at the other extreme unions are regarded as organisations which are quasi democratic due to the presence of informal parties or factions the growth of workplace organisation and the existence of voting and postal or workplace balloting these two polar approaches to trade unions as large organisations may be linked up to parallel economic analyses of organisations if it is believed that trade unions are oligarchies then it may be enlightening to apply to unions economic models of bureaucracy or models of the firm comprising both shareholders and management alternatively if it is believed that trade unions are democratic organisations then public choice behavioural models may be enlightening the public choice model is chosen in this paper in preference to modern theories of the firm or of bureaucracies because it is believed that the public choice model represents a closer first approximation to trade union behaviour in the united kingdom although of course some particular unions may better fit the oligarchic model the second major concern of this paper is to relax the assumption of a fixed level of union membership the use of a fixed membership assumption in the

the return of the wage phillips curve the standard new keynesian model with staggered wage setting is shown to imply a simple dynamic relation between wage inflation and unemployment under some assumptions that relation takes a form similar to that found in empirical applications starting with the original phillips 1958 curve and may thus be viewed as providing some theoretical foundations to the latter the structural wage equation derived here is shown to account reasonably well for the comovement of wage inflation and the unemployment rate in the u s economy even under the strong assumption of a constant natural rate of unemployment

interest rates inflation and federal reserve policy since 1980 this paper characterizes federal reserve policy since 1980 as one that actively manages short term nominal interest rates in order to control inflation and evaluates this policy using a dynamic stochastic sticky price model of the united states economy the results show that the fed s policy insulates aggregate output from the effects of exogenous demand side disturbances and by calling for a modest but persistent reduction in short term interest rates following a positive technology shock helps the economy to respond to supply side disturbances as it would in the absence of nominal rigidities

miners wages in post war britain an application of a model of trade union behavior the paper studies the determination of wages in the british coal industry a utility maximising model of a trade union is used to represent the behaviour of the national union of mineworkers a non linear structural model is derived and is estimated by full information maximum likelihood the results are quite encouraging there is support for a neo classical demand curve for miners labour and a significant estimate of workers relative risk aversion

optimal monetary policy in a small open economy with home bias we analyze optimal monetary policy in a small open economy characterized by home bias in consumption peculiar to our framework is the application of a ramseytype analysis to a model of the recent open economy new keynesian literature we show that home bias in consumption is a su cient condition for inducing the monetary policy maker of an open economy to deviate from a strategy of strict markup stabilization and contemplate some optimal degree of exchange rate stabilization we focus on the optimal setting of policy both in the case of rms setting prices one period in advance and in a gradual fashion subject to adjustment costs while the rst setup allows us to analytically highlight home bias as an independent source of equilibrium

alternative designs for tariffs on embodied carbon a global cost effectiveness analysis in the absence of effective world wide cooperation to curb global warming import tariffs on embodied carbon have been proposed as a potential supplement to unilateral emissions pricing we consider alternative designs for such tariffs and analyze their effects on global welfare within a multi region multi sector computable general equilibrium cge model of global trade and energy our analysis suggests that the most cost efficient policy could be region specific tariffs on all products based on direct plus electricity emissions in the end however the potential cost savings through carbon tariffs must be weighed against the administrative costs as well as legal issues and political considerations

the tradeoff between wages and employment in trade union objectives this paper demonstrates that contrary to a widely held opinion the determination of the goals of unions is fully amenable to empirical analysis a characterization of the wage and employment setting process in unionized markets is adopted and its qualitative implications examined the first order condition for this model is fitted to time series data on the newspaper industry from ten cities the international typographical union s objective function reveals very restricted opportunities for substituting wages for employment in response to a change in the slope of the employer s labor demand function larger union locals place greater emphasis on wages versus employment than smaller union locals

wage aspirations and unemployment persistence abstract we use panel data to examine the empirical determinants of the reservation wage in particular the influence of previous wages and consider what this implies for the evolution of the natural rate of unemployment we find that previous wages have a significant but relatively small effect on reservation wages an elasticity between 0 15 and 0 47 we also find considerable differences across genders with previous wages being more important for men and market wages being more important for women overall our results suggest that the reservation wage will adjust quite quickly to shocks

information revelation and market incompleteness this paper introduces a theory of market incompleteness based on the information transmission role of prices and its adverse impact on the provision of insurance in financial markets we analyse a simple security design model in which the number and payoff of securities are endogenous agents have rational expectations and differ in information endowments and attitudes toward risk when markets are incomplete equilibrium prices are typically partially revealing while full relevation is attained with complete markets the optimality of complete or incomplete markets depends on whether the adverse selection effect the unwillingness of agents to trade risks when they are informationally disadvantaged is stronger or weaker than the hirshleifer effect the impossibility of trading risks that have already been resolved as new securities are issued and prices reveal more information when the hirshleifer effect dominates an incomplete set of securities is preferred by all agents and generates a higher volume of trade hirshleifer 1971 was the first to point out that revelation of information can reduce risksharing opportunities in insurance markets resulting in a welfare loss in this paper we build on hirshleifer s insight to develop a theory of endogenous market incompleteness we show that in an economy with asymmetric information in which agents learn from prices an incomplete financial structure may be optimal the reason is that less information is revealed by prices when markets are incomplete than in an otherwise identical economy with complete markets 1 paradoxically a greater degree of incompleteness may result in better risk sharing since the only risks that can be traded are those whose resolution is not common knowledge at the time of trade for the same reason incompleteness of markets may also foster a higher volume of trade the connection between security design asymmetric information trading volume and welfare in financial markets is a subtle one and it is important to isolate its various facets the efficacy of security markets in aggregating and transmitting private information depends on the characteristics of the financial structure and especially on the number of tradeable assets indeed within the rational expectations paradigm informational differences disappear in equilibrium generically when the price vector has

inflation adjustment and labour market structures evidence from a multi country study the impact of labour market structures on the response of inflation to macroeconomic shocks is analysed empirically results based on a 20 country panel show that if labour market coordination is high the effect on inflation of movements in unemployment import prices tax rates and productivity is dampened both on impact and dynamically in contrast monopoly power in labour supply measured by the percentage unionisation of the workforce appears to amplify the response of inflation to its reduced form determinants these findings are attributed to the behaviour of wages following movements in demand and supply side conditions

an integration of trade union models in a sequential bargaining framework this paper aims to embed two popular models of trade union behavior the monopoly model and the efficient bargaining model in a more general framework it does this by analyzing sequential bargaining models where wages are determined before employment and the power of the union in the two stages of the bargain differs as well as finding that the monopoly and efficient bargain models are special cases of this model a new class of models is also discovered this framework is used to analyze the relationship between union pow er and efficiency the empirical analysis of trade unions and the effects of trade union legislation copyright 1987 by royal economic society

ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of financial markets it is widely thought that incomes risks can be shared by trading in financial assets but financial assets typically carry some risk idiosyncratic to them hence disposing incomes risk using financial assets will involve buying into the inherent idiosyncratic risk however standard theory argues that diversification would reduce the inconvenience of idiosyncratic risk to arbitrarily low levels this argument is less robust than what standard theory leads us to believe ambiguity aversion can exacerbate the tension between the two kinds of risks to the point that classes of agents may not want to trade some financial assets thus theoretically the effect of ambiguity aversion on financial markets is to make the risk sharing opportunities offered by financial markets less complete than it would be otherwise

european emission trading scheme and competitiveness a case study on the iron and steel industry abstract we quantify the impact of the european emission trading scheme ets on the two dimensions of competitiveness production and profitability for the iron and steel industry among those covered by the scheme this sector is one of the most exposed since it is both highly co 2 intensive and relatively open to international trade we also examine the robustness of these results to various assumptions marginal abatement cost curve trade and demand elasticities as well as pass through rates and updating of allocation rules of which the latter two are scarcely debated we conclude that for this sector competitiveness losses are small we prove this conclusion to be robust hence arguments against tightening the environmental stringency of the ets in phase ii are not justified on grounds of competitiveness loss our systematic sensitivity analysis allows us to identify the important assumptions for each output variable it turns out that pass through rates and updating rules are significant despite being often implicit and least debated in existing analyses

unions power collective bargaining and optimal monetary policy we study ramsey policies and optimal monetary policy rules in a model with sticky prices and unionized labour markets collective wage bargaining and unions monopoly power dampen wage uctuations and amplify employment uctuations relatively to a dnk model the optimal

can tariffs be used to enforce paris climate commitments we evaluate the potential of border carbon adjustments bcas and strategic tariffs to compel noncompliant countries to meet emission reduction targets pledged under the paris climate agreement our analysis employs a numerical economy wide model with energy sector detail and given recent actions by the us administration considers bcas on us exports we find that when the us does not restrict emissions and faces bcas on its exports us welfare losses are smaller than when the us meets its paris commitments hence bcas are preferable for the us and cannot be used to enforce paris climate commitments the use of strategic tariffs on the contrary would result in a trade war and a larger welfare decrease in us welfare than when it meets its paris commitments strategic tariffs also decrease welfare in countries that meet their paris pledges accordingly strategic tariffs which are much higher than bca rates can be used to enforce paris climate commitments if compliant countries are willing to incur welfare losses to punish non compliant countries

adverse selection and security design this paper studies the problem of optimal security design by a privately informed entrepreneur in the context of a simple parametric model it is shown that the entrepreneur does not find it profitable to float an asset that affords her an informational advantage the reason is that with rational uninformed outside investors the entrepreneur faces adverse selection in the security market which prevents her from exploiting her position as an insider this is true whether or not she has market power in trading the asset consider a risk averse entrepreneur who is contemplating what security to issue the entrepreneur anticipates that during subsequent trading in the secondary market she will have private information on the payoff of her investment as well as on other risks in the economy the design of the asset is therefore influenced not only by a desire to share risk but also by informational considerations involving the potential for insider trading profits this paper studies the problem of optimal security design in the context of a simple parametric model with gaussian risks and cara utility trading in the secondary market is modelled via the static reduced form concept of rational expectations equilibrium in which uninformed outside investors use market prices to try to infer the private information of the entrepreneur or insider as she will sometimes be called it is shown that the entrepreneur does not find it profitable to float an asset that affords her an informational advantage an optimal asset entails a fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium and is perfectly correlated with the issuer s endowment risk the reason is that with rational outside investors the entrepreneur faces adverse selection in the security market which prevents her from exploiting her position as an insider she is better off foregoing her informational advantage and concentrating on her hedging motive alone in the particular setting described in the paper equity2 is an optimal asset since the entrepreneur has no privileged information regarding its payoff and it allows efficient risk sharing the issue of security design when prices have an informational role to play is just beginning to be researched closely related to this paper is the work of demange and laroque 1995 who use a competitive rational expectations model with noise traders to analyse the problem posed above except for some special cases however they are able to get only numerical results in comparison the present paper obtains partially revealing equilibria in a model in which all agents are rational furthermore demange and laroque

border carbon adjustments addressing emissions embodied in trade approximately one fourth of global emissions are embodied in international trade and a significant portion flows from non carbon priced to carbon priced economies border carbon adjustments bcas figure prominently as instruments to address concerns arising from unilateral climate policy estimating the volume of emissions that could be potentially taxed under a bca scheme has received little attention until now this paper examines how a number of issues involved in the implementation of bcas can affect their ability to cover emissions embodied in trade and thus address carbon leakage these issues range from ensuring compliance with trade provisions and assumptions on the carbon intensity of imports to determining which countries are included and whether intermediate and final demand are considered here we show that the volume of co2 captured by a scheme that involved all annex b countries could be significantly reduced due to these issues particularly by trade provisions such as the principle of best available technology bat as a consequence the tariff burdens faced by non annex b parties could dwindle considerably these findings have important policy implications as they question the effectiveness and practicalities of bcas to reduce carbon leakage and alleviate competitiveness concerns adding further arguments against their implementation

cost effective unilateral climate policy design size matters given the bleak prospects for a global agreement on mitigating climate change pressure for unilateral abatement is increasing a major challenge is emissions leakage border carbon adjustments and output based allocation of emissions allowances can increase effectiveness of unilateral action but introduce distortions of their own we assess antileakage measures as a function of abatement coalition size we first develop a partial equilibrium analytical framework to see how these instruments affect emissions within and outside the coalition we then employ a computable general equilibrium model of international trade and energy use to assess the strategies as the coalition grows we find that full border adjustments rank first in global cost effectiveness followed by import tariffs and output based rebates the differences across measures and their overall appeal decline as the abatement coalition grows in terms of cost the coalition countries prefer border carbon adjustments countries outside the coalition prefer output based rebates

the role of shocks and institutions in the rise of european unemployment the aggregate evidence two key facts about european unemployment must be explained the rise in unemployment since the 1960s and the heterogeneity of individual country experiences while adverse shocks can potentially explain much of the rise in unemployment there is insufficient heterogeneity in these shocks to explain cross country differences alternatively while explanations focusing on labour market institutions explain current heterogeneity well many of these institutions pre date the rise in unemployment based on a panel of institutions and shocks for 20 oecd nations since 1960 we find that the interaction between shocks and institutions is crucial to explaining both stylised facts

optimal fiscal and monetary policy some recent results this paper studies the quantitative properties of fiscal and monetary policy in business cycle models in terms of fiscal policy optimal labor tax rates are virtually constant and optimal capital income tax rates are close to zero on average in terms of monetary policy the friedman rule is optimal nominal interest rates are zero and optimal monetary policy is activist in the sense that it responds to shocks to the economy

border tax adjustments in the climate policy context co2 versus broad based ghg emission targeting abstract using a multi region multi sector computable general equilibrium cge model this paper compares the efficiency distributional and emission leakage effects of border tax adjustments btas as part of unilateral climate policies that are based on carbon dioxide co2 only versus those based on all greenhouse gases ghgs simulation results suggest that the broad based ghg policies in general have lower efficiency costs and result in less re distributive effects btas bring modest efficiency gains with adverse distributional consequences the distributional impacts are smaller under broad based ghg policies compared to that based on co2 only however these are due to a wider variety of abatement options under multi gas policies rather than the btas per se the main difference between the two policies is distributional effects first co2 only based policies have worse impacts on fossil fuel exporters such as russia and relatively better outcomes for oil importers such as india and china compared to that of multi gas policies particularly when it involves large global emission reduction second sectoral coverage under btas also influences the differential outcomes for example brazil is worse impacted under ghg based policies if agriculture is brought under btas as two third of its emissions are non co2 based and agriculture is the primary source of these emissions

optimal monetary policy in economies with dual labor markets abstract we present a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge new keynesian model with indivisible labor and a dual labor market a walrasian one where wages are fully flexible and a unionized one characterized by real wage rigidity we show that the negative effect of a productivity shock on inflation and the positive effect of a cost push shock are crucially determined by the proportion of firms that belong to the unionized sector the larger this number the larger are these effects consequently the larger the union coverage the larger should be the optimal response of the nominal interest rate to exogenous productivity and cost push shocks the optimal inflation and output gap volatility increases as the number of the unionized firms in the economy increases

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract this paper is concerned with the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital in a dynamic context optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare maximizing way for a barter economy our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure an optimal policy if one exists is time consistent in a monetary economy the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an inflation tax and we find that time consistency does not carry over an optimal inflation tax requires commitment by rules in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes the reason time consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should from a welfare maximizing point of view always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of capital levy this emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital

insurance and opportunities a welfare analysis of labor market risk abstract using a model with constant relative risk aversion preferences endogenous labor supply and partial insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk this paper provides an analytical characterization of three welfare effects a the welfare effect of a rise in wage dispersion b the welfare gain from completing markets and c the welfare effect from eliminating risk the analysis reveals an important trade off for these welfare calculations on the one hand higher wage uncertainty increases the cost associated with missing insurance markets on the other hand greater wage dispersion presents opportunities to raise aggregate productivity by concentrating market work among more productive workers welfare effects can be expressed in terms of the underlying parameters defining preferences and wage risk or alternatively in terms of changes in observable second moments of the joint distribution over individual wages consumption and hours

optimal spreading when spreading is optimal abstract this paper assumes an investor who has a non traded position operating in a stochastic interest rates environment the investor trades continuously either distinct futures contracts or distinct forward contracts in order to maximize his expected utility of terminal wealth in order to reach the welfare level of the first best optimum the investor must incorporate into his portfolio either two distinct futures contracts or two distinct forward contracts the optimal forward contracts dynamic spreading strategy has two components a speculative component and a minimum variance hedging component the minimum variance hedging component is composed of a short position in the nearby contract and a long position in the deferred contract the speculative component serves to replicate the growth optimum portfolio the speculative component is composed of a short position in the contract which is the most negatively correlated with the growth optimum portfolio and a long position in the other contract the marking to market procedure of the futures positions forces the investor to hold less futures contracts than the corresponding forward contract positions the analysis is also extended to incomplete markets and to inter market spreading

ramsey monetary policy with labor market frictions abstract traditional new keynesian models prescribe that optimal monetary policy should aim at price stability in the absence of a labor market frictions the monetary authority faces no unemployment inflation trade off the design of optimal monetary policy is analyzed here for a framework with sticky prices and matching frictions in the labor market optimal policy features deviations from price stability in response to both productivity and government expenditure shocks when the hosios 1990 on the efficiency of matching and related models of search and unemployment review of economic studies 57 2 279 298 condition is not met search externalities make the flexible price allocation unfeasible optimal deviations from price stability increase with workers bargaining power as firms incentives to post vacancies fall and unemployment fluctuates above the pareto efficient one

endogenous determination of the degree of market incompleteness in futures innovation abstract this paper studies the determination of the number of futures contracts created by an exchange we show that though the exchange can create the futures contracts costlessly if the investors have differential information there may be an upper bound on the number of contracts that the exchange is willing to create in a stylized economy we investigate what type of contracts and how many of these the exchange is willing to create journal of economic literature classification numbers d52 d82 g14

trade unions and optimal labour contracts the recently revived literature on wage and employment determination under trade unionism has in our opinion contributed important insights into the functioning of especially european labour markets it suffers however from a potentially serious deficiency with a few exceptions it neglects completely the issue of risk shifting between workers and employers 3 in particular it disregards entirely the possibility of such risk shifting in economies characterized by more or less encompassing trade unions and centralized wage setting as e g the scandinavian countries the netherlands and austria a typical feature of trade unions in these countries is that they are not only concerned with wage setting but strive in various ways to increase their member s welfare at the expense of the employers by reducing their members exposure to risk for instance unions demand limits to the employers right to require overtime or co lay off workers or they demand occupational safety rules work injury insurance health insurance etc an actual employment contract hence not only entitles the worker to a certain wage and the employer to a certain number of working ho urs in return but is really a package of rights and responsibilities for both parties increases in the amount of insurance such a package provides are sometimes explicitly declared to be obtained through foregone wage increases while risk shifting hence is of prime importance to real world unions the formal trade union literature is almost entirely concerned with wage and employment setting under certainty

unilateral co2 reductions and carbon leakage the consequences of international trade in oil and basic materials a recursively dynamic general equilibrium model featuring six world regions with trade in energy and non energy goods is used to simulate the period from 1990 through 2100 in 10 year intervals the simulations explore the effect of unilateral action by the oecd to curb global co2 emissions unilateral cuts create incentives for free riding by non participating regions so that global emissions are reduced by less than the amount that the oecd cuts back its regional emissions carbon leakage occurs through two channels first basic materials production increases in unconstrained regions resulting in increased carbon intensity of gdp second reductions in oecd oil imports cause the world oil price to fall leading to an increased energy intensity in the non participant regions in this paper we use a general equilibrium model to assess the extent to which these two mechanisms reduce the effectiveness of oecd reductions in curbing global co2 concentrations

unemployment and the business cycle abstract this paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model where labor effort is imperfectly observable and there is unemployment in equilibrium in contrast to shirking models in the efficiency wage literature detected shirkers are not dismissed instead they face a monetary punishment because they forgo an increase in their compensation estimated versions of the model can generate the high variation in employment and low variation of real wages observed over the business cycle and are consistent with existing qualitative evidence about the responses of the economy to fiscal policy shocks

wage dynamics reconciling theory and evidence u s macroeconomic evidence shows a negative relation between the rate of change of wages and unemployment in contrast most theories of wage determination imply a negative relation between the level of wages and unemployment in this paper we ask whether one can reconcile the empirical evidence with theoretical wage relations we reach three main conclusions first we derive the condition under which the two can indeed be reconciled we show the constraints that such a condition imposes on the determinants of workers reservation wages as well as the relative importance of workers outside options as opposed to match specific productivity in wage determination second in the light of this condition we reinterpret the presence of an error correction term in macroeconomic wage relations for most european economies but not in the united states third we show that whether this condition holds or not has important implications for the effects of a number of variables from real interest rates to oil prices to payroll taxes on the natural rate of unemployment this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the impact of border carbon adjustments under alternative producer responses border carbon adjustments bcas have been proposed to address leakage and competitiveness concerns in traditional assessments firms regard bcas as output taxes rather than implicit emissions taxes using a stylized energy economic model we analyze the impact of bcas for alternative producer responses when firms view bcas as an implicit emissions tax the outcome depends on whether or not firms can differentiate production across destination markets if firms are able to produce a lowemissions variety for regions imposing bcas results are similar to when firms regard bcas as an output tax if firms produce a single variety for all markets bcas result in larger leakage reductions than in standard approaches we also find that bcas are less effective at addressing competitive concerns in scenarios that result in larger leakage reductions jel codes f18 q54

business cycles unemployment insurance and the calibration of matching models this paper theoretically and empirically documents a puzzle that arises when an rbc economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment the standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market policies but it cannot do both variable search and separation finite ui benefit duration efficiency wages and capital all fail to resolve this puzzle however either sticky wages or match specific productivity shocks can improve the model s performance by making the firm s flow of surplus more procyclical which makes hiring more procyclical too

a dynamic contracting model for wages and employment in three european economies we present a structural dynamic non linear model for an efficient contracting between a firm facing adjustment costs on labour and a union having preferences which are subject to habit formation the model s first order necessary conditions are estimated for the french the dutch and the belgian labour market the estimation results turned out to be remarkably similar for the three countries two alternative hypotheses are also investigated i a myopic behaviour of the union and ii a competitive labour market the performance of the efficient contract model with a forward looking union is found to be superior to that of the neo classical model in explaining the dynamics of employment and wages in the three countries

economic and environmental impact analysis of carbon tariffs on chinese exports as an alternative measure for the proposal of border tax adjustments btas advocated by the countries that seek to abate co2 emissions hereafter referred to as abating countries export carbon tax ect voluntarily conducted by the developing countries has been widely discussed in recent years this paper uses the multi regional and multi commodity computable general equilibrium cge model and the gtap8 1 database to investigate the economic and environmental effects of carbon tariffs on chinese exports the following three policy scenarios are considered 1 the abating countries implement cap and trade emission programs without btas 2 the unilaterally abating countries levy import tariffs and export subsidies on non abating countries and 3 the abating countries implement unilateral climate policies combined with ect imposed by china the ect policy of china is evaluated with a carbon price set at 17 us t co2 results illustrate that the ect voluntarily implemented by china is ineffective in reducing its domestic co2 emissions moreover ect merely has a minor impact on global emissions finally the competitiveness of china s energy intensive and trade exposed eite industries suffers substantial losses if export tariffs are imposed however china s gains in terms of welfare and gross domestic product gdp would be slightly improved if an ect policy is implemented compared to the scenario where china is subjected to btas levied by the abating coalition in the light of the tradeoff between tariff revenue for welfare and competiveness losses of the eite industries it is therefore difficult to conclude that carbon tariff on chinese exports is an alternative policy to btas

dynamic asset pricing with non redundant forwards abstract in an incomplete market in which non redundant forward contracts contribute to span the uncertainty some standard results of portfolio theory must be amended when the investment opportunity set is driven by k state variables a k 3 mutual fund separation theorem is obtained in lieu of merton s k 2 fund separation result the additional fund is a portfolio that hedges the interest rate risk brought about by the optimal portfolio strategy itself second the mean variance efficiency of the market portfolio of cash assets is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the linear relationship between expected return and beta to hold third the pricing equation for a forward contract is shown to contain an extra term relative to that for a cash asset term we name strategy risk premium

the effects of border crossing frequencies associated with carbon footprints on border carbon adjustments abstract the fragmentation of production across national boundaries has become an important feature of the world economy this present paper adopts the viewpoint that not only the size and composition of carbon footprints are relevant but also the border crossing frequency associated with these carbon footprints which is defined as the number of borders a product crosses in a supply chain this process will affect the spatial accounting of the carbon emissions produced to support the economic activity the calculation of border crossing frequencies of carbon footprint is accomplished by decomposing the leontief inverse matrix derived from the world input output database we find that the aggregated average border crossing frequencies of carbon footprints show an increasing tendency which is influenced by the economic crisis obviously the policy application focuses on the united states which we assume to levy carbon tariffs on foreign emissions embodied in imports we find that the indirect carbon tariff on emissions embodied in international trade take a significant share the border carbon adjustments are mainly targeted at emissions generated in china which also pays the greatest share of the tariff burden the implication of carbon tariffs faces the problem of multiple taxation

a non walrasian labor market in a monetary model of the business cycle abstract this paper investigates to what extent a new keynesian monetary model with the addition of a microfounded non walrasian labor market solely based on union bargaining is able to replicate key aspects of the business cycle the presence of a representative union offers an explanation for two features of the cycle first it generates an endogenous mechanism which produces persistent responses to both supply and demand shocks second labor unionization reduces the elasticity of marginal costs to output this leads to lower inflation volatility model simulations show that the unionized framework can better reproduce european business cycle data than can a model with a competitive labor market

optimal futures innovation in a dynamic economy the discrete time case abstract we study the optimal futures innovation in a dynamic economy and investigate how the results obtained in a static economy should be modified due to the possibility of dynamic trading we analyze three different notions of ex ante optimality depending on the authority s ability to redistribute wealth among the investors and characterize the optimal futures innovation in each sense journal of economic literature classification numbers d52 d60 g10

optimal environmental border adjustments under the general agreement on tariffs and trade a country choosing to adopt border carbon adjustments based on embodied emissions is motivated by both environmental and strategic incentives we argue that the strategic component is inconsistent with commitments under the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt we extend the theory of border adjustments to neutralize the strategic incentive and consider the remaining environmental incentive in a simplified structure the theory supports border adjustments on carbon content that are below the domestic carbon price because price signals sent through border adjustments inadvertently encourage consumption of emissions intensive goods in unregulated regions the theoretic intuition is supported in our applied numeric simulations countries imposing border adjustments at the domestic carbon price will be extracting rents from unregulated regions at the expense of efficient environmental policy and consistency with international trade law

a look inwards carbon tariffs versus internal improvements in emissions trading systems abstract subglobal climate policies will be the norm for some years to come however several options exist for improving the efficiency of domestic emissions regulation a prominent but contentious policy option for improving the external efficiency is the implementation of carbon tariffs on non regulating regions this is thought to reduce carbon leakage and increase domestic production albeit at the cost of non regulating countries in contrast internal efficiency improvements can be more collaborative in type among others they include extending and linking of domestic emissions trading systems this study compares the relative economic impacts of those policy options if annex i countries would follow one or the other the study uses a computable general equilibrium model of the global world economy and develops a set of emissions trading and carbon tariff scenarios with various degrees of sectoral and regional coverage for a globally effective annex i emissions reduction target of 20 the results indicate that linking annex i countries domestic emissions trading systems and expanding their sectoral coverage could yield greater global welfare improvements than implementing carbon tariffs on energy intensive goods imported from non annex i countries while non annex i countries would be significantly better off without facing carbon tariffs on their exports annex i countries could gain from either policy the relative gains from linking and extending the sectoral coverage of domestic emissions trading systems are greater for early policy implementation within a large annex i coalition of climate regulating countries while late implementation within a small coalition would yield greater relative welfare gains from imposing carbon tariffs the results suggest that in addition to the political benefits there exists an economic rationale for substituting the external efficiency improvements associated with implementing carbon tariffs with internal ones associated with extending annex i countries emissions trading systems

indeterminacy and fiscal policies in a growing economy this paper studies the dynamic properties of a standard one sector model of endogenous growth with inelastic labor supply in which capital taxes are used to nance public production and consumption services the government is benevolent and chooses its tax policy by taking into account the decentralized competitive equilibrium within this second best setup we establish conditions for multiple balanced growth paths in conjunction with indeterminacy of transitional dynamics the mechanism for global and local indeterminacy is a simple combination of public production services that provide production externalities to private rms and hence cause a wedge between private and social returns public consumption services that provide direct utility to households and endogenously chosen distorting taxes

money in an estimated business cycle model of the euro area this article examines the role of money in a small scale dynamic general equilibrium model of the euro zone estimated by maximum likelihood the model allows for both intertemporal and intratemporal non separability in preferences we find first that real balances do not affect the marginal utility of consumption second money demand shocks mainly help to forecast real balances while real shocks explain the bulk of price output and interest rates fluctuations third the calculation of the natural rate of interest reveals that the evolution of the interest rate is mostly accounted for by the real sources of fluctuations

the role of stocks and shocks concepts in the debate over price versus quantity recent literature showed that the choice between a price or quantity control depends in part on the dynamic structure of cost uncertainty temporary shocks to abatement cost favors the use of a price control while permanent shocks favor a quantity control unfortunately the importance of this assumption to the optimal choice has not yet received wide attention among economists we analyze the regulatory sproblem in an alternative setting and reproduce these results our contribution is the simplicity of the model and the accessibility of the results which reinforce the critical role played by the assumed structure of uncertainty

a numerical investigation of the potential for negative emissions leakage leakage of greenhouse gas emissions increased emissions in unconstrained regions due to regulations in other regions undermines the effectiveness of sub global climate regulations reduces incentives for unilateral climate initiatives and can result in distortionary trade measures winchester 2012 these concerns are expressed in measures to reduce leakage included in the eu emissions trading scheme and draft legislation in the united states the now defunct waxman markey bill two sources of leakage include changes in fossil fuel prices and trade flows carbone helm and rutherford 2009 leakage via fossilfuel price effects occurs when reduced energy demand in constrained regions decreases fuel prices and increases fuel use in unconstrained regions trade changes contribute to leakage when production increases in unconstrained regions as a result of increased exports to and reduced imports from constrained regions

income variance dynamics and heterogeneity recent theoretical work has shown the importance of measuring microeconomic uncertainty for models of both general and partial equilibrium under imperfect insurance in this paper the assumption of i i d income innovations used in previous empirical studies is removed and the focus of the analysis is placed on models for the conditional variance of income shocks which is related to the measure of risk emphasized by the theory we first discriminate amongst various models of earnings determination that separate income shocks into idiosyncratic transitory and permanent components we allow for education and time specific differences in the stochastic process for earnings and for measurement error the conditional variance of the income shocks is modelled as a parsimonious arch process with both observable and unobserved heterogeneity the empirical analysis is conducted on data drawn from the 1967 1992 panel study of income dynamics we find strong evidence of sizeable arch effects as well as evidence of unobserved heterogeneity in the variances