We study the gains from trade in a model with endogenously variable markups. We show that the pro-competitive gains from trade are large if the economy is characterized by (i) extensive misallocation, i.e., large inefficiencies associated with markups, and (ii) a weak pattern of cross-country...

The study of autocracies and weakly institutionalized countries is plagued by scarcity of information about the relative strength of different players within the political system. This paper presents novel data on the composition of government coalitions in a sample of fifteen post-colonial...

Colonial Americans complained that gold and silver coins (specie) were chronically scarce. These coins could be acquired only through importation. Given unrestricted trade in specie, market arbitrage should have eliminated chronic scarcity. A model of efficient barter and local inside money is...

Both Research and Development (R&D) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) investment have been identified as sources of relative innovation underperformance in Europe vis-à-vis the United States. In this paper we investigate R&D and ICT investment at the firm level in an effort to...

We analyze the influence of health and financial incentives on the retirement behavior of older workers in France, building upon Stock and Wise (1990) option value approach. The model accounts for three main retirement routes: the normal retirement, disability insurance (DI) and...

Differences in real interest rates across developed economies are puzzlingly large and persistent. I propose a simple explanation: Bonds issued in the currencies of larger economies are expensive because they insure against shocks that affect a larger fraction of the world economy. I show that...

The workhorse model of optimal taxation strongly recommends tagging, but its use in policy is limited. I argue that this puzzle is a symptom of a more fundamental problem. Conventional theory neglects the diverse normative criteria with which, as extensive evidence has shown, most people...

This paper builds on the methods of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to estimate person-centered treatment (PeT) effects that are conditioned on the person's observed characteristics and averaged over the potential conditional distribution of...

This paper describes six stylized patterns among housing markets in the United States that potential explanations of the housing boom and bust should seek to explain. First, individual housing markets in the U.S. experienced considerable heterogeneity in the amplitudes of their cycles. Second,...

The very poor in developing countries often make intertemporal choices that seem at odds with their individual self-interest. There are many possible reasons why. We investigate several of these reasons with a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Malawi involving large stakes. We make two...