We ask whether barriers to entry are a quantitatively important reason for the income gap between developing countries and the U.S. We develop a tractable general equilibrium model that captures the effects of barriers to entry and the other main classes of distortion typically considered in the...

We study the effects of large transportation costs on economic development. Since reliable data for developing countries are hard to come by, we go back in time to the Midwest and the Northeast of the U.S. This is a natural case to study because starting from 1840 decent data is available...

We ask how barriers to international trade affect TFP when there are monopoly rights in the import-competing industries. Holmes and Schmitz (1995) show that without barriers to trade TFP in these industries is as large as possible. We study the general case of finite barriers to trade. We find...