A large literature explores crowd out in situations where public goods are jointly provided; work in this area typically depicts a tax system where individuals take taxes as given. But in some settings, such as those in developing economies, efforts to evade or avoid taxes may be widespread. Using...

We analyze how a price control and the threat of compulsory licensing (CL) affect consumer access in a developing country (South) to a patented foreign product. In the model, the Southern government sets the level of the price control on a Northern patent-holder who chooses between entry and...

Poor communities sometimes resist private investment and destroy economic surplus even if the government has the willingness and ability to redistribute. We interpret such acts of resistance as demands for redistribution: Destruction contains credible information about how the affected group...

We derive a bargaining model of transfers between adult children and their parents, and then estimate the model using data from South Korea. Our analysis extends the literature on family bargaining by i) arguing that transfers from the couple represent semiprivate consumption (e.g. it is...

Exploiting cross-state variation in infectious causes of death, along with time variation arising from medical innovations toward the middle of the twentieth century, this study examines the consequences of a positive health shock in the US. It establishes that states with higher levels of...

There are two opposite views regarding whether stronger protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) will benefit or hurt the South. We provide a unification using a model of directed innovations with identical but non-homothetic preferences. For the South, a major benefit of protecting...

We examine how multinational firms strategically source production to mitigate the consequences of wage bargaining with workers. When wage bargaining pressure differs across countries, firms allocate production of goods with high markups toward countries with relatively competitive labor...

There has long been a concern among policymakers that too much of remittances are consumed and too little saved, limiting the development impact of migration. Financial literacy programs have become an increasingly popular way to try and address this issue, but to date there is no evidence that...

This paper introduces the Small World model into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integration affects firm size and efficiency, norm enforcement, and aggregate economic performance. When economic integration is low and local connectivity is high, informal...

The effects of political fragmentation on long-run development seem to have changed over the course of human history. Technological leaders used to be empires, but the Industrial Revolution started in the fragmented Europe. This paper sets up a model to help us think about this puzzle. There are...