This paper studies the issue of the efficient taxation of capital income in intertemporal optimizing models with infinite horizons and endogenous population growth. We discover that, in the steady state, the optimal capital income tax is negative when the economy is closed. Instead, in a small...

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work...

This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. We examine disparities in health status, health care utilization...

The paper develops two synthetic measures at the HS-10 level to depict effective market access for a country receiving preferential access and applies these to the market access ASEAN members would receive on impact following the implementation of an FTA with the EU. These measures reveal quite...

This paper explores the links between the patterns of migration (high vs. low-skill), trade policy, and foreign direct investment (FDI) from the standpoint of sending countries. A skeleton general equilibrium model with a non-traded good and sector-specific labour is used to explore the effects...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth...

We argue that, in the presence of asymmetric countries, a trade agreement that conforms to GATT’s reciprocity rule allows the (stronger) less trade dependent country to improve its welfare relative to both the free trade and the trade war. Conversely, the (weaker) more trade dependent country...

In models with heterogeneous firms trade integration has a positive impact on aggregate productivity through the selection of the best firms as import competition drives the least productive ones out of the market. To quantify the impact of firm selection on productivity, we calibrate and...

This work provides an empirical assessment of the ’sophistication’ of the Italian international specialization pattern and of its evolution during the period 1980−2000. In particular we discuss the Italian ’anomaly’, i.e. the evidence that Italy displays a specialization pattern more...

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate...