In this paper, the authors examine the political economy drivers of the variation in agricultural protection, both across countries and within countries over time. The paper starts by listing the key insights provided by both the theoretical and empirical literature on the political economy of...

In this paper, we create alternative measures of political instability, which capture movements only from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa (consistent with the recent theoretical work by Acemoglu and Robinson) but, unlike older, well known measures do not capture government changes that...

In this paper, we present two alternative models of trade and unemployment, in which unemployment is generated through a search mechanism. The basic framework of the first model is Ricardian in that the only factor of production is labor and trade is based on relative technological differences....