Migration restrictions are pervasive and severe. Their worldwide enactment starting in the 1920's constituted a fundamental policy shift for a number of countries and for the world as whole. Yet, very little is currently known about the quantitative consequences of these barriers to labor...

We ask which part of the observed cross-country differences in the level of per capita income can be accounted for by monopoly rights in the labour market. We answer this question in a calibrated growth model with two final goods sectors. The novel feature being that monopoly rights in the...

We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns in production and technological spillovers, international trade leads to a stable world income distribution. This is because specialization and trade introduce de facto diminishing returns – countries that accumulate capital faster than...

This paper analyzes, in a linear market with two adjacent countries, how firm location and optimal plant size depend on differences in the quality of infrastructures and income levels between countries. The study considers also how a free trade agreement may change, in this context where...

We define a country's technology as a triple of efficiencies: one for unskilled labour, one for skilled labour, and one for capital. We find a negative cross-country correlation between the efficiency of unskilled labour and the efficiencies of skilled labour and capital. We interpret this...

This chapter reviews the literature that tries to explain the disparity and variation of GDP per worker and GDP per capita across countries and across time. There are many potential explanations for the different patterns of development across countries, including differences in luck, raw...