Changes in inequality of yearly earnings can arise from changes in the distribution of lifetime earnings (permanent changes) and changes in the stability of earnings (transitory changes). Past research has found increases in both components in the United States over the past several decades. We...

This paper develops a simple competitive model of CEO pay. It appears to explain much of the rise in CEO compensation in the US economy, without assuming managerial entrenchment, mishandling of options, or theft. CEOs have observable managerial talent and are matched to assets in a competitive...

In the last five years the international macroeconomics literature has become increasingly concerned with global current account imbalances, with particular focus on the size and persistence of the US current account deficit. While much of the recent literature on global imbalances (e.g....

This paper analyzes the cross-country allocation and volume of multinational production, quantifies its barriers, and assesses its impact on welfare. From the patterns of multinational production across countries, three facts stand out: a small fraction of country-pairs engages in multinational...

We report an intriguing empirical observation. The relationship between corruption and output depends on the economy's degree of openness: in open economies, corruption and GNP per capita are strongly negatively correlated, but in closed economies there is no relationship at all. This stylized...

We develop a model of a small open economy with three types of nominal rigidities (domestic goods prices, imported goods prices and wages) and eight different structural shocks. We estimate the model's structural parameters using a maximum likelihood procedure and use it to compute...

The inertia of the local-currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange-rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in International Economics.This paper develops a frame-work for identifying the sources of local-currency price stability at each stage of the distribution chain. The...

This paper revisits three features of the data that are widely known: (a) there exists a high correlation between bilateral nominal and real exchange rates; (b) real exchange rate movements are highly persistent; and (c) real exchange rates are highly volatile. The paper attempts a joint, albeit...

I study the implications for the development of a country hosting of multinational firms. The paper argues that despite the negative impact on existing local firms, the presence of foreign firms induce the emergence of a new sector of domestic firms and that in the long term, the country to...

The incomplete nature of contracts governing international transactions limits the extent to which the production process can be fragmented across borders. In a dynamic, general-equilibrium Ricardian model of North-South trade, the incompleteness of international contracts is shown to lead to...