We study the incentives to expropriate foreign capital under democracy and oligarchy. We model a two-sector small open economy where foreign investment triggers Stolper-Samuelson effects through reducing exporting costs. We show how incentives to expropriate depend on the distributional effects...

This paper develops a politico-economic model for use in studying the role of intra-elite conflict in the simultaneous determination of a country’s political regime, trade policy and income-tax-based redistribution scheme. Three socioeconomic groups are involved: two elite groups and workers,...

We explore the political economy of trade and labor mobility in a Ricardian world. We combine a Ricardian economy with a simple international political economy model as a basis for the determination of trade and labor mobility policies. We show that free trade can induce partial convergence,...

We develop a theoretical model to study how changes in the durability of the goods affects prices of stolen goods, the incentives to steal and the equilibrium crime rate. When studying the production of durable goods, we find that the presence of crime affects consumer and producer surplus and...

Why did the most prosperous colonies in the British Empire mount a rebellion? Even more puzzling, why didn't the British agree to have American representation in Parliament and quickly settle the dispute peacefully? At first glance, it would appear that a deal could have been reached to share...

We discuss the past, present and future of the structural approach in empirical microeconomics, starting with its inception in the 1970s and 1980s. Our focus is on the use of the structural microeconometric approach in labor economics, broadly defined to include population economics, human...

We study democratization, coups and trade policy determination in an environment marked by intra-elite conflict over trade policy by taking a simple general equilibrium model of an open economy and combining it with the Acemoglu-Robinson model of democratization. Unlike the approaches taken in...