Regional liberalization sweeps the globe like wildfire while multilateral trade talks proceed at a glacial pace. Why are countries eager to liberalize regionally but reluctant to do so multilaterally? The answer of the GATT-is-dead school is that multilateralism is too cumbersome for...

This paper presents an explicit model of the link between the 1992 market liberalization and the aggregate marginal productivity of EC capital. We show that the liberalization is likely to lead to a ceteris paribus rise in capital's marginal product and thereby raise the steady-state...

Productive factors such as human and physical capital are accumulated and trade can affect the steady-state levels of such factors. Consequently, trade liberalization will have dynamic effects on output and welfare as the economy moves to its new steady state, in addition to its usual static...

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...