In this article, we analyze an economy in which agents vote over immigration policy and redistributive tax policy. We show that natives' preferences over immigration are influenced by the prospect that immigrants will be voting over future tax policy. We also show that changes in the degree of international capital mobility, the distribution of initial capital among natives, the wealth or poverty of the immigrant pool, and the future voting rights and entitlements of immigrants can have dramatic effects on equilibrium immigration and tax policies. Finally, we provide some empirical support for the model's predictions.

A multi-sector business cycle model is constructed which is capable of reproducing the procyclica1 behavior of cross-industry measures of capital, employment, and output. It is shown that some variants of conventional business cycle models may not be capable of reproducing these facts. It is then shown how the introduction of intratemporal adjustment costs can be crucial to such a model. These costs imply that it is difficult or costly to alter the composition of the capital goods that are produced. The presence of these costs eliminates many counterfactual observations of the model that would otherwise be present. The dynamic response of variables in the model is different from what one would observe in the standard one-sector model. The effect of including intratemporal adjustment costs for labor as well is also analyzed. , We thank Finn Kydland for many useful discussions over the course of this project. We also received helpful comments from seminar participants at University College Dublin, Pennsylvania State University, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the 1995 meetings of the Western Economic Association. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.

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What can account for the different contemporaneous inflation experiences of various countries, and of the same country over time? We present an analysis of the determination of inflation from a political economy perspective. We document a positive correlation between income inequality and inflation and then present a theory of the determination of inflation outcomes in democratic societies that illustrates how greater inequality leads to greater inflation, owing to a desire by voters for wealth redistribution. We conclude by showing that democracies with more independent central banks tend to have better inflation outcomes for a given degree of inequality. JEL Classification E5, H0Inégalité, inflation et l'indépendance de la banque centrale. Quels sont les facteurs qui pourraient expliquer les expériences inflationnistes tellement différentes des divers pays dans le passé récent, et l'expérience tellement différente d'un pays donné dans le temps? Les auteurs analysent ce problème de la détermination du taux d'inflation dans une perspective d'économie politique. Ils déterminent qu'il y a une corrélation positive entre l'inégalité et l'inflation, et présentent une théorie de la détermination de l'inflation dans les sociétés démocratiques qui montre comment une inégalité plus grande entraîne une inflation plus grande à cause du désir des électeurs de demander une redistribution de la richesse. Le mémoire montre en terminant que les démocraties equipées de banques centrales plus indépendantes tendent à avoir de meilleurs résultats en terme d'inflation pour un degré d'inégalité donné.

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