‘Is there some action a government of Australia could take that would lead the Australian economy to grow like Korea’s or Taiwan’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the ‘nature of Australia’ that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else’ (With...

This paper develops a simple macroeconomic model that shows that combining capital market imperfections together with unequal access to investment opportunities across individuals can generate endogenous and permanent fluctuations in aggregate GDP, investment, and interest rates. Reducing inequality of access may be a necessary condition for macroeconomic stabilization. Moreover, countercyclica...

Grandmont (1985) found that the parameter space of even the simplest, most classical models is stratified into bifurcation regions. But in such classical models all policies are Ricardian equivalent and all solutions are Pareto optimal. As a result he was not able to reach conclusions about policy relevance of his dramatic discovery. Barnett and He (1999,2002) subsequently found transcritical, ...

This paper examines the stochastic properties of aggregate macroeconomic time series from the standpoint of fractionally integrated models, focusing on the persistence of economic shocks. We develop a simple macroeconomic model that exhibits long-range dependence, a consequence of aggregation in the presence of real business cycles. We then derive the relation between properties of fractionally...

In this paper we analyse the effect of news relating to the expected path of monetary policy on interest rate futures. Central banks’ transparency is in most respects much greater than it was a decade ago, and so central bank communication needs to be included as a potential source of news. We therefore consider four types of news: macroeconomic news, overseas news, monetary policy surprises an...

This paper proposes a new approach for analyzing the relationship between macroeconomic factors and the income distribution. The conventional method of analysis is regression of summary inequality indices on variables such as the unemployment and inflation rates. Building on the lessons from recent advances in time-series econometrics, we suggest instead that one should first fit a parametric f...

This study investigates the effects of the macroeconomic context on attitudes to immigration. Earlier studies do in some cases not provide significant empirical support for the existence of important such effects. In this article it is argued that this lack of consistent evidence is mainly due to the cross-national setup of these studies being vulnerable to estimation bias caused by country-spe...

The main objective of this paper is to contribute to the literature on employment-GDP elasticities by assessing the determinants of cross-country variations in employment elasticities, focusing particularly on the role of demographic and macroeconomic variables. Long-term employment– GDP elasticities are estimated using an unbalanced panel of 90 developing countries from 1991 to 2011 using a tw...

The construction industry is one of the largest sectors in the U.S. economy, yet little is known about the key macroeconomic parameters that affect its industry’s structure and performance. The main objectives of this research are 1) to analyze the macroeconomic performance of construction industry as a whole and at fourteen of its sub-sectors in terms of labor productivity, gross margin, and w...