Tradable performance standards are widely used sectoral regulatory policies. Examples include the US lead phasedown, fuel economy standards for automobiles, renewable portfolio standards, low carbon fuel standards, and—most recently—China’s new national carbon market. At the same time,...

With congestion being one of the most important externalities in transportation, it remains important to investigate effective and politically feasible solutions for it. We have conducted an 8-week experiment with tradable mobility permits, specifically applied to the use of parking facilities...

This paper studies the role played by the distribution sector in shaping the behavior of the real exchange rate during exchange-rate-based-stabilizations. We use data for the U.S. and Argentina to document the importance of distribution margins in retail prices and disaggregated price data to...

The non-tradability of human capital is often cited for the failure of traditional asset pricing theory to explain agents' portfolio holdings. In this paper we argue that the opposite might be true --- traditional models might not be able to explain agent portfolio holdings because they do not...

The existence of a natural resource curse has been a longstanding theme in the economic literature and in policy discussions. We propose an alternative mechanism and study its policy implications. The mechanism is based on the interaction between two building blocks: specialization in...

Income differences across countries primarily reflect differences in total factor productivity (TFP). More disaggregated data show that the TFP gap between rich and poor countries varies systematically across industrial sectors of the economy: Poor countries are particularly unproductive in...

In this paper we characterize empirically the comovements of macro variables typically observed in middle income countries, as well as the boom-bust cycle' that has been observed during the last two decades. We find that many countries that have liberalized their financial markets, have...

In this paper, we explore the role of trade in differentiated final goods as well offshoring of tasks for inequality both within and between countries. We emphasize the distinction between managerial and production labor. Production labor is assumed to be a variable input composed of tradable...

This paper studies the impact of trade reforms on the evolution of plant's productivity in Chile (1979-2000). The main contribution of the paper is to construct detailed measures of trade liberalization disentangling the impact of export and import oriented policies. We find evidence of a...

I study the effects of service offshoring on white-collar employment, using highly disaggregated occupational data for the U.S.. I present a structural model of the firm's behavior that allows tractable derivation of labor demand elasticities for highly detailed occupations. I estimate the model...