We study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy. We consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size and in their capacities for innovation. We associate the strength of IPR protection with the...

Labour incomes depend on structural as well as politico-economic factors, because labour market policies partially remedy the financial market imperfections that make labour income shocks difficult to insure, and have different implications for labour and capital income. This paper illustrates...

Evidence for the United States suggests balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and less than unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawa's theorem to show that introducing human capital...

If people understand that some macroeconomic policies are unsustainable, why would they vote for them in the first place? We develop a political economy theory of the endogenous emergence of fiscal crises, based on the idea that the adjustment mechanism to a crisis favors some social groups,...

This paper proposes a stylized model of policy determination and imperfect international integration. A country-specific policy wedge corrects labor market imperfections and/or redistributes welfare across differently wealthy agents. Capital market integration with the rest of the world, indexed...

“Race-to-the-bottom” deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern...

The authors propose a theory of task trade between countries that have similar relative factor endowments and technological capabilities but may differ in size. Firms produce differentiated goods by performing a continuum of tasks, each of which generates local spillovers. Tasks can be performed...

The authors develop a framework for studying trade in horizontally and vertically differentiated products. In their model, consumers with heterogeneous incomes and tastes purchase a homogeneous good and make a discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated product. The distribution...