Governments frequently intervene to support domestic industries, but a surprising amount of this support goes to ailing sectors. We explain this with a lobbying model that allows for entry and sunk costs. Specifically, policy is influenced by pressure groups that incur lobbying expenses to...

This paper explores the impact of trade on growth when firms are heterogeneous. We find that greater openness produces anti-and pro-growth effects. The Melitz-model selection effects raises the expected cost of introducing a new variety and this tends to slow the rate of new-variety introduction...

A simple model of offshoring, which depicts offshoring as 'shadow migration,' permits straightforward derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for the effects on wages, prices, production and trade. We show that offshoring requires modification of the four classic international trade...

Our paper integrates results from trade-in-task theory into mainstream trade theory by developing trade-in-task analogues to the four famous theorems (Heckscher-Ohlin, factor price equalisation, Stolper-Samuelson, and Rybczynski) and showing the standard gains-from-trade theorem does not hold...

Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully foster them. We describe the...

The received economic wisdom is that cities are too big and that public policy should limit their sizes. This wisdom assumes, unrealistically, that city sites are homogeneous, migration is unfettered, land is given freely to incoming migrants, and federal taxes are neutral. Should those...

This paper presents five theoretical openness-and-growth links that can account for trade-induced investment-led growth. The links are all demonstrated with neoclassical growth models developed in the context of trade models that allow for imperfect competition and scale economies. This sort of...

This paper shows that the market structure of an economy's research sector is an important determinant of the aggregate growth rate, even though it has hereto been ignored in the new growth literature. To make this point in a concrete context, a simple model is used to show that import...

Despite its important theoretical, empirical and policy implications, sunk-cost hysteresis has not been characterized for the case of model consistent, or rational expectations (previous studies assume that firms believe the forcing variable is generated by some ad hoc, time invariant process...

International economists typically assume that temporary real exchange rate shocks can have only temporary real effects -and no effect at all on the underlying structure of the economy. This paper shows that even in a simple "off-the-shelf" industrial organization model, this assumption is...