There are both empirical and theoretical arguments for the thesis that foreign factors have an impact on domestic institutional quality. Yet the literature is divided over whether exposure (openness to the world economy) or the kind of institutions in surrounding countries (relative location)...

Prices differ across space: from province to province, from rural (or urban) areas in one province to rural (or urban) areas in another province, and from rural to urban areas within one province. Systematic differences in prices across a range of goods and services in different localities imply...

There are differences in performance between farmers. In the Netherlands this has been a major topic of research for at least 30 years. Research has shown that the managerial capacities of farmers play a major role in differences in economic and environmental performance. Management can be...

This paper investigates the asymmetries in trade spillovers from sector-specific technology shocks in China to selected euro area countries. We use a Ricardian-gravity trade model to estimate sectoral competitiveness in individual euro area countries. Simulations on the impact of productivity...

This paper develops a quantitative, multi-country model of endogenous growth, international trade, and international knowledge flows in order to understand how access to both foreign products and technologies, together, influences innovation incentives and the world distribution of income. An...

Standard growth models require large differences in barriers to capital accumulation to reproduce the observed disparities in the wealth of nations. I introduce technology adoption and schooling decisions into a standard growth model and show that the required differences in barriers implied by...

There are two opposite views regarding whether stronger protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) will benefit or hurt the South. We provide a unification using a model of directed innovations with identical but non-homothetic preferences. For the South, a major benefit of protecting...

This paper analyzes, in a linear market with two adjacent countries, how firm location and optimal plant size depend on differences in the quality of infrastructures and income levels between countries. The study considers also how a free trade agreement may change, in this context where...

From 1960 to 2003, Turkey has underperformed relative to several Western economies, in terms of hours worked and output per hour. Our sectoral analysis illustrates two points. First, Turkey's large drop in hours is due to the fact that the substantial decline in agricultural hours has not been...

Can the initial distribution of land, in a country's early history, affect its subsequent economic development? In this paper, I show that when land ownership is sufficiently concentrated, the landed elite will lobby the government to raise barriers to industrialization in order to protect its...