There have been few attempts to empirically explain the pursuit of short term relationships and sex in a formal context. Previous work has lamented the paucity of empirical studies which utilize incentive driven behavior to draw conclusions and recommend policy. We develop a model of social...

The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. This paper generalizes the forward-looking voter model to a broad range of dynamic, non-concave income...

Although firms are dispersed across space and may face radically different production conditions, this dimension of firm heterogeneity is often overlooked. Differences between factor markets, especially for labor, are stark. To pursue this line of inquiry, we model firm hiring across local labor...

We investigate the empirical validity of the median voter theory of trade policy. Mayer’s classic framework predicts that the optimal tariff is positive for a capital-abundant country and negative for a labor-abundant country (Mayer, 1984). However, import subsidies are rare so the tariff...

This paper examines the empirical validity of the Mayer-Heckscher-Ohlin (M-H-O) model. We test the inequality-tariff relationship studied by Dutt & Mitra (2002) as well as a large country version of Mayer’s model. Dutt and Mitra (2002) found support for the inequality-tariff implication of the...