Our recent work examines the links among innovations, technology, trade, and growth. One strand focuses on research activity, technology diffusion, and growth. The other examines technology and trade. In this paper we exploit the common treatment of technology in these two strands to provide a...

Innovative activity is highly concentrated in a handful of advanced countries. These same countries are also the major exporters of capital goods to the rest of the world. We develop a model of trsde in capital goods to assess its role spreading the benefits of technological advances.

After a brief overview of the types of evidence on the role of distance in affecting migration, the paper critically examines a number of hypotheses as to why distance might deter migration, then draws out some implications for the emergence and persistence of geographic poverty traps.

Fluctuations in the terms of trade-the price of a country's exports relative to the price of its imports-are a source of perennial to policymakers in developing countries and industrialized nations alike. Terms of trade growth is extremely volatile and can lead to sudden changes in a country's...

While the European Monetary Union (EMU) is now a real ity, debate among economists nonetheless continues about the design and desirability of monetary unions.Since an essential element of a monetary union is the delegation of monetary power to a single centralized entity, one of the key issues...

This paper examines whether historical ealth distributions can affect long run output and distribution despite rational saving behavior and absence of any technological nonconvexities or externalities. We consider a model of equilibrium short period financial contracts, where poor agents face...

We analyse the behaviour of foreign banks who sequentially provide credit to finance projects in an emerging market. The foreign banks are exposed to both micro-economic risks and the macro-economic risk of a currency crisis, and there are no bailout guarantees.

This paper studies the persistence of inequality and lack of intergenerational mobility in a human capital accumulation model with perfect certainty, missing credit markets, endogenous training costs and dynastic utility maximization by households. Persistent inequality and immobility in steady...