Working papers results

In the transitional phase towards full economic integration, European countries have the possibility of re-shaping the continental geography of specialization. We develop a two-sector two-country model that shows formally how fiscal policy can be critical in promoting specialization in a phase where increasing returns are strong enough to sustain agglomeration but local barriers are too high for agglomeration to arise endogenously. We show that, in this intermediate phase, the optimal policy is to levy asymmetric taxes on the two sectors in order to induce agglomeration and therefore welfare benefits to both countries.

I explore the dynamics of national production in a two-sector, two country model with cross-sector mobility and forward-looking agents, when trade costs fall or when the news of a boom in a sector is learned. Using the phase diagram method, introduced by Baldwin 1999 in this type of applications, I discover some important and interesting features of the equilibria and of their stability properties, which would have been completely overlooked by the "simple" static model as in Fujita et al. 1999. In particular I find out that, lacking comparative advantage, specialization may not take place at all labor market rigidities are too high, while the existence of comparative advantage ensures full specialization for intermediate values of the trade cost even in the presence of high labor market rigidities.

Europe is faced with serious problems of slow growth and little employment creation. Are the two problems related at all? Our proposed answer is: yes, they are. Building on Daveri and Tabellini (1997), we developed an infinite-horizon model with endogenous growth due to learning-by-doing and unemployment due to monopoly union bargaining in the labor market. In this framework, high labor and capital taxes and unemployment subsidies may in principle reduce employment and growth. The model is then calibrated using actual data from a variety of countries in Continental Europe, which we identify as the closest to our toy model. We run two types of balanced-budget fiscal policy experiments, focusing on their employment and growth effects .First, we separately change tax rates on capital, labor and subsidies, as well as replacement rates, while assuming that the government budget is kept balanced by appropriate changes in lump-sum trasnfers. Second, we cut labor taxes and adjust capital taxes in order to keep the GDP share of lump-sum transfers unchanged. Our numerical results suggest that, in the absence of binding revenue constraints, reducing labor taxes and unemployment subsidies is beneficial to both employment and growth, while capital taxes are less useful. if revenue constraints are binding, instead, cutting labor taxes is in general ineffective in boosting employment and growth.

The adjustment of labour markets during transition has been quite different from that anticipated by the Optimal Speed of Transition (OST) literature. In particular, it has involved stagnant unemployment pools, large flows to inactivity and strikingly low workers mobility especially when account is made of the changes occurring in the structure of employment by sector, occupation and ownership of firms.

Furthermore the policy trade-offs embedded in the OST literature relate mainly to the alternative between a big-bang strategy and a gradual transition process. This amounts to assuming that governments can control the pace of closure of state enterprises. However, the facts discussed in this paper suggest that separations from state sector employment were, ultimately, an endogenous variable rather than a policy instrument, as they were to a large extent the byproduct of voluntary choices of workers.

The Importance of innovation for the economic performance of industrialized countries has been largely stressed recently by the theoretical and empirical literature. Very few studies have carefully considered the determinants of European innovation, the productivity of its R&D and the existence of knowledge spillovers across regional boundaries. Here we develop a model which, emphasizing "the demand pull" as a key exogenous determinant of long-run innovation across regions, allows us to estimate the returns to regional R&D as a generator of innovation. We find that most of the cross-regional differences in innovation rates can be explained by own R&D, even after correcting for the endogeneity bias. Moreover, significant spillovers are found among geographically close regions, especially if they are technologically similar.

Returns to scale to capital and the strength of capital externalities play a key role for the empirical predictions and policy implications of different growth theories. We show that both can be identified with individual wage data and implement our approach at the city-level using US Census data on individuals in 173 cities for 1970, 1980, and 1990. Estimation takes into account fixed effects, endogeneity of capital accumulation, and measurement error. We find no evidence for human or physical capital externalities and decreasing aggregate returns to capital. Returns to scale to physical and human capital are around 80 percent. We also find strong complementarities between human capital and labor and substantial total employment externalities.

This paper studies both theoretically and empirically the determinants of group formation and of the degree of participation when the population is heterogeneous, both in terms of income and race or ethncity. We are especially interested in whether and how much the degree of heterogeneity in communities infuences the amount of participation in different types of groups. Using survey data on group membership and data on US localities, we find that, after controlling for many individual characteristics, participation in social activities is significatively lower in more unequal and in more racially or ethnically fragmented localities. We also find that those individuals who express views against racial mixing are less prone to participate in groups the more racially heterogeneous their community is.

We study the enforcement of competition policy against collusion under Leniency Programs, which give reduced fines to firms revealing information to the Antitrust Authority. Such programs give firms an incentive to break collusion, but may also have a pro-collusive effect, since they decrease the expected cost of misbehaviour. We analyze the optimal policy under alternative rules and with homogeneous and heterogeneous cartels, obtaining a ranking of the different schemes and showing when the use of reduced fines may improve antitrust enforcement.

Observed fiscal policy varies greatly across time and countries. How can we explain this variation across time and countries? This paper surveys the recent literature that has tried to answer this question. We adopt a unified approach in portraying public policy as the equilibrium outcome of an explicitly specified political process. We divide the material into three parts. In Part I, we focus on median-voter equilibria that apply to policy issues where disagreement between voters is likely to be one-dimensional. We thus study the general redistributive programs, which are typical of the modern welfare state: redistribution between rich and poor, young and old, employed and unemployed, resident of different regions, and labor and capital. In Part II we study special interest politics. Here the policy problem is multi-dimensional and we focus on specific political mechanisms: we study legislative bargaining, lobbying, and electoral competition, as well as the possible interactions between these different forms of political activity. Finally, Part III deals with a set of questions that can be brought under the label of comparative politics, as we deal with policy choice under alternative political constitutions: we model some styilized features of congressional and parliamentary political systems, focusing on their implications for rent extraction by politicians, redistribution and public goods provision.

In this paper we propose an approach to identify indipendently the parameters describing the structure of the economy from the parameters describing central bank preferences. We first estimate the parameters describing the structure of the US economy by considering a parsimonious specification for inflation, the output-gap and the commodity price index. We then proceed to the identification of central bank preferences by estimating by GMM the Euler equations for the solution of the intertemporal optimization problem relevant to the central banker. We then compare optimal and actual interest rate behavior to select a structure of central banks preferences. Our main results are as follows. First, persistence in interest rates could be explained by the structure of the economy. Second, "strict" inflation targeting dominates "flexible" inflation targeting. Third, the actual behavior of the policy rates cannot be described by the pure "strict" inflation targeting model, which would imply a much more aggressive monetary policy than the observed one. Fourth, when the inflation targeting model is extended to consider Brainard-type uncertainty and real interest rates smoothing, the latter is preferred hypothesis to reconcile actual and optimal interest rates behavior.