European Union economies are pressed by (i) a demographic change that induces population ageing and a decline of the workforce, and (ii) a split labour market that is characterized by high levels of unemployment for low-skilled people and a simultaneous shortage of skilled workers. This lack of flexible high-skilled workers and the aging process has created the image of an immobile labour force and ...
Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyzes the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low-skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labor. Each group of workers benefits from a different kind of public good. Mobility of skilled workers provides an incentive for jurisdictions to ...
This paper investigates the degree of integration of natural gas markets in Europe, North America and Japan in the time period between the early 1990s and 2004. The relationship between international gas market prices and their relation to the oil price are explored through principal components analysis and Johansen likelihood-based cointegration procedure. Both of them show a high level of natural ...
Can a growing welfare state induce a regime switch in the growth rate of an economy? This paper constructs a dynamic political economy model of economic growth and the welfare state in which both variables are nonlinearly related and jointly endogenous. Using a Markov switching framework over the period 1950-2001, we find that the structural decline in growth rates that several welfare state economies ...
We study the political economy of commuting subsidies in a model of a monocentric city with two income classes. Depending on housing demand and transport costs, either the rich or the poor live in the central city and the other group in the suburbs. Commuting subsidies increase the net income of those with long commutes or high transport costs. They also affect land rents and therefore the income of ...
