We estimate geographic barriers to trade in nine service categories for Canada's provinces from 1997 to 2007 with novel high quality bilateral provincial trade data. The border directly reduces average provincial trade with the US relative to interprovincial trade to 2.4% of its borderless...

When firms engaged in R&D are observably heterogeneous (in size) and policymakers are able to condition policy on the observed heterogeneity, what is the optimal policy? This paper starts with a static two-stage duopoly model of R&D competition with uncertainty and finds it welfare enhancing to...

We extend the structural gravity model to identify external economies or diseconomies of scale elasticities of cross-border trade. We find statistically and quantitatively significant economies of scale in cross-border trade in 5/8ths of sector-direction cases for Canadian provinces while the...

We compare two institutions head on, a family compact – a parent makes a transfer to her parent in anticipation of a possible future gift from her children – with a pay-as-you-go, social security system in a lifecycle model with endogenous fertility wherein children are valued both as...

This paper infers the terms of trade effects of the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) of the 1990s. Using panel data methods to resolve two way causality between trade and FTAs, we estimate large FTA effects on bilateral trade volume in digit manufacturing goods from 1990-2002. We deduce the terms of...

Despite only modest supporting evidence, shocks to households' personal finances are commonly cited as one of the principal causes of homeowner defaults. In this paper, I investigate the extent to which different component sources of annual variation in property tax obligations influence the...

Organizational design (firm boundaries) is an important aspect of a firm's internal structure and is affected by market conditions. Our main focus in this paper is on firm boundaries - firms' integration decisions - and how these decisions interact with product market competition, in a setting...

This paper revisits the economic theory of John Bates Clark, with specific reference to his concept of capital, which seems very little remembered. For Clark, capital is to be distinguished from capital goods and is a resource that is at once immaterial and, in routine circumstances, permanent....

Despite ample anecdotal evidence for intensive international integration, the gravity literature of international trade fails to deliver consistent empirical support for globalization and for diminishing effects of distance on bilateral trade. Capitalizing on the properties of the structural...

We introduce a model of an infinitely-lived nonprofit organization facing donor crowd-out by government grants and credit constraints. The nonprofit chooses the optimal allocation of resources over time between providing service and fund-raising activities. We show that the response of...