Some international organizations are governed by unanimity rule, some others by a majority system. Still others have moved from one system to the other over time. The existing voting models, which generally assume that decisions made by voting are perfectly enforceable, have a difficult time...

In this paper we explore the potential gains that a trade agreement (TA) can provide by regulating trade-policy uncertainty, in addition to the more standard gains from reducing the mean levels of trade barriers. We show that in a standard trade model with income-risk neutrality there tends to...

Formal economic analysis of trade agreements typically treats disputes as synonymous with concerns about enforcement. But in reality, most WTO disputes involve disagreements of interpretation concerning the agreement, or instances where the agreement is simply silent. And some have suggested...

The prevalence of shirking within a large Italian bank appears to be characterized by significant regional differentials. In particular, absenteeism and misconduct episodes are substantially more prevalent in the south. We consider a number of potential explanations for this fact: different...

In this paper we reconsider a key empirical prediction generated by an important class of political-economy models of trade policy, namely that trade protection should be higher in sectors characterized by lower import penetration (we call this the little support for this prediction. In this...

We investigate whether a welfare-maximizing government ought to pursue a program of" strategic trade intervention or instead commit itself to free trade when domestic firms will have an opportunity to manipulate the government's choice of the level of" intervention. Domestic firms may overinvest...

A prominent model in the recent political-economy literature on trade policy is Grossman and Helpman's (1994) Protection for Sale' model. This model yields clear predictions for the cross-sectional structure of trade protection. The objective of our" paper is to check whether the predictions of...