In this paper we provide some evidence that repeat taking of competitive exams may reduce the impact of background disadvantages on educational outcomes. Using administrative data on the university entrance exam in Turkey we estimate cumulative learning between the first and the nth attempt...

Why do developing countries fail to specialize in products that they (at least potentially) have a comparative advantage in? For example, farmers in land-poor developing countries overwhelmingly produce staples rather than exotic fruits that command high prices. We propose a simple model of...

This paper investigates two main questions: i) What do applicants take into consideration when choosing a high school? ii) To what extent do schools contribute to their students' academic success? To answer these questions, we model students' preferences and derive demand for each school by...

This paper builds a tractable partial equilibrium model in the spirit of Melitz (2003), which incorporates two dimensions of heterogeneity: firms specific productivity shocks and firm-market specific demand shocks. The structural parameters of interest are estimated using only cross-sectional...

This paper surveys recent work on the economic effects, both theoretical and empirical, of Rules of Origin (RoO) in a Free Trade Area (FTA).

This paper looks at the effect of credit constraints on skill acquisition when agents have heterogeneous abilities and wealth. We use a two factor general equilibrium model and assume credit markets are absent. We explore the effects of trade on factor earnings as well as the evolution of the...

We examine the sensitivity of simple calibration models of trade in imperfectly competitive industries to changes in model specification, as well as to changes in the calibration parameters. We find that not just the magnitude, but also the sign of the optimal trade policies is very sensitive to...

This paper models investment/entry decisions in a competitive industry that is subject to a quantity control on an input for production. The quantity control is implemented by auctioning licenses for the restricted input. The paper shows that liberalizing the quantity control could reduce...

This paper looks at the predictions of a standard heterogeneous firm model regarding the exports of firms across markets in response to a particular trade policy "experiment" and compares these predictions to the data. A unique feature of our data is that it has information on the exports of the...

This paper critically and selectively surveys the literature on protection for sale and discusses directions for future research in this area. It suggests that the standard approach needs to be augmented to provide more compelling tests of this model.