U.S. investors abroad receive a higher return on their assets than their counterparts that invest in the United States. I examine the degree to which excluding intangible assets and repatriation taxes from the international transactions accounts can account for this gap. Using a growth...

Trade weighting is a common method of aggregating trade frictions. It will understate changes in these costs when there are non<i>ad valorem</i> trade costs and quality differences. Newly traded goods enter at higher trade costs than previously traded ones. Lower import costs shift trade to lowquality...

Manufacturing and vertical specialization (VS) trade, trade in goods that incorporate imported inputs, have grown rapidly since the 1960s. I argue that declining trade costs are an important explanation for these facts. I present a three stage vertical specialization trade model, with raw...

The Atlas Narodov Mira has been used extensively to investigate the effects of ethnic divisions, but little is known about how it defines ethnicity. Most theories of ethnicity emphasize the tendency of group members to marry within the group (endogamy). This note surveys studies of ethnic...

Using a new dataset, we document a systematic pattern in the demographic characteristics of car buyers over the model year: as vehicle prices fall over the model year, so do buyer incomes. This pattern is consistent with price-insensitive buyers purchasing early in the year, while others wait...

The Excel spreadsheet contains the data used in Figure 2 as well as the calibration exercice.

Despite the pervasiveness of industry regulation, there are few studies of its impact on industry productivity. Assessing regulation's impact on productivity has been difficult for a number of reasons, including the complexity of regulations and the difficulty measuring productivity. We study an...

The Atlas Narodov Mira has been used extensively to investigate the effects of ethnic divisions, but little is known about how it defines ethnicity. Most theories of ethnicity emphasize the tendency of group members to marry within the group (endogamy). This note surveys studies of ethnic...