This paper shows that the WTO's Article XXIV increases the likelihood of free trade, but may worsen world welfare when free trade is not reached and customs unions (CUs) form.  We consider a model of many countries.  Article XXIV prevents a CU from raising its common external tariff, which...

Sufficient conditions are developed for third-degree price discrimination by a monopolist serving all markets to reduce and raise social welfare.  Welfare falls if the demand function in the market whose price is higher with discrimination is at least as convex as that in the other market (at...

In the workhorse  model of welfare economics, the elasticity of marginal utility, often denoted as η, serves simultaneously to represent aversion to risk, aversion to spatial inequality, and preferences for intertemporal substitution.  While Kreps-Porteus-Selden and Epstein-Zin preferences...

Suppose we wish to carry out likelihood based inference but we solely have an unbiased simulation based estimator of the likelihood.  We note that unbiasedness is enough when the estimated likelihood is used inside a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.  This result has recently been introduced in...

The paper estimates cross-province growth regressions for China over the period of economic reform.  It first addresses the problem of model uncertainty by adopting two approaches to model selection, Bayesian Model Averaging and the automated General-to-Specific approach, to consider a wide...

The 'expectations critique', usually attributed to Friedman or Phelps and dated towards the end of the 1960s, in fact originates much earlier.  And rather than being an insight properly attributable to a particular individual, it was, by that time, a commonplace of economic discussion.  This...

In the context of macroeconomic coordination, studies of the social value of information distinguish sharply between private and public information.  However, no information is truly public (that is, common knowledge) or private in the established sense.  This paper develops a general approach...

The rate of cost pass-through exceeds 50% under strategic delegation of decision-making to managers with sales revenue contracts - regardless of the number of firms in the industry and demand curvature.  This contrasts sharply with profit-maximization, for which cost pass-through can take on...

This paper uses demand analysis to explore whether intrahousehold allocation of education expenditure differs between boys and girls in rural Sri Lanka.  Contrary to most countries in South Asia a significant bias favouring girls is found in 1990/91 for the 5-9 and 17-19 age groups and in...

Productivity advances drive long-run economic growth, and a crucial factor is labour productivity improvements.  The productivity of labour in China was marginally relevant in the pre-1978 period, but the picture has changed dramatically in the reform period due to numerous labour market...