The theory bears some testable predictions. First, the probability of future civil wars increases after each conflict episode. Second, a sequence of "accidental" conflicts can lead to the permanent breakdown of trust, plunging a society into a state of recurrent conflicts (a war trap). This...

This paper investigates the welfare gains from European trade integration, and the role of comparative advantage in determining the magnitude of those gains. We use a multi-sector Ricardian model implemented on 75 countries, and compare welfare in the 2000s to a counterfactual scenario in which...

Using an industry-level dataset of production and trade spanning 75 countries and 5 decades, and a fully specified multi-sector Ricardian model, we estimate productivities at the sector level and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries. We find that in both...