Cross-country labor productivity differences are large in agriculture and much smaller in non-agriculture. We argue that these relative productivity differences arise when subsistence consumption needs prevent workers in poor countries from specializing in the sector in which they are most...

Empirical studies find a strong positive relationship between a country’s per-capita income and price level of final tradable goods. Among alternative explanations of this observation, I focus on variable mark-ups by firms. Mark-ups that vary with destinations’ incomes are evident from a...

in both a simple analytic model, where news shocks overcome the ``dynamic inconsistencies" documented in Estrella and Fuhrer (2002), and in a model that incorporates many of the real rigidities common to DSGE models. The paper calls for more thoughtful modeling of how information about...

Using a dynamic factor model, we uncover four main empirical regularities on international comovements in a long-run panel of real and nominal variables. First, the contribution of world comovements to domestic output growth has decreased over the post-WWII period. The contribution of regional...

of reputation building converges to a level strictly between 0 and 1. However, the two limiting cases differ in the number of third party signals invoked.

linear hidden action preferences exhibiting a preference for late resolution of uncertainty. The costly contemplation model (Ergin and Sarver (2008a)), as well as a generalization of the Kreps and Porteus (1978) model that allows for preference for flexibility in the sense of DLR (2001) are also...

and search for a difference in the pattern of environmental quality when technological progress is taken to be endogenous by extending Brock and Taylor (2003). Brock and Taylor define pollution production and abatement explicitly by considering pollution as an output of both production and...

data support the model predictions.

Capacity addition and withdrawal decisions are among the most important strategic decisions made by firms in oligopolistic industries. In this paper, we develop and analyze a fully dynamic model of an oligopolistic industry with lumpy capacity and lumpy investment/disinvestment. We use our model...

rational expectations.