Child labor is a persistent phenomenon in many developing countries. In recent years, support has been growing among rich-country governments and consumer groups for the use of trade policies, such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards, to reduce child labor in...

One of the key social transformations that accompanied the British Industrial Revolution was the economic decline of the aristocracy. Standard theories of wealth inequality cannot explain why the aristocrats, in spite of their superior wealth and education, failed to be the main protagonists and...

This paper shows that a zero-sum redistribution of wealth within a country can have persistent aggregate effects. Motivated by the caseof an unanticipated inflation episode, we consider redistribution shocks that shift resources from old to young households. Aggregate effects arise because there...

We analyze positive theories of redistribution, social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework. Political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents. Voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of...

We construct a model where the equilibrium organization of firms changes as an economy approaches the world technology frontier. In vertically integrated firms, owners (managers) have to spend time both on production and innovation activities, and this creates managerial overload, and...