Whereas most U.S. corporations are widely held, the predominant form of ownership in East Asia is control by a family, which often supplies a top manager. These features of "crony capitalism" are actually more pronounced in Western Europe. In both regions, the salient agency problem is...

An expected-utility-maximizing investor spends his portfolio income on commodities and real balances. Commodity prices and asset payoffs are determined endogenously in general equilibrium. The impact of commodity prices on investor welfare yields surprising relationships among the expected...

Gravity equations have been widely used to infer trade flow effects of various institutional arrangements. We show that estimated gravity equations do not have a theoretical foundation. This implies both that estimation suffers from omitted variables bias and that comparative statics analysis is...

The incidence of bilateral trade costs is calculated here using neglected properties of the structural gravity model, disaggregated by commodity and region, and re-aggregated into forms useful for economic geography. For Canada's provinces, 1992-2003, sellers' incidence is on average some five...