The transaction cost literature continues to mature as improvements have been made on both theoretical and empirical fronts. Over the past several years, serious attempts have been made to actually measure transaction costs. Here I argue that successful measurement must solve three...

This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of economic performance through time. The model incorporates four main determinants of economic performance: technology, capital investment, the division of labor and quality of institutions. It demonstrates that growth is not automatic even...

While the role of division of labour is very important, in itself its scope for promoting economic growth is limited. This scope is tremendously expanded when division of labour is compounded with that of capital accumulation and technical progress and the interaction/reinforcing effects between...

This paper develops a general equilibrium Ricardian model with transaction costs to investigate the determinants of the firm's sourcing decision. It derives conditions under which different sourcing choices and corresponding trade patterns occur in general equilibrium. These conditions suggest...

After outlining what appears to be the central principle unifying the literature of the division of labour that has been expanding during the last two decades, I highlight a set of selected research topics, which appear to me to be of particular significance and therefore deserve much further...

This paper applies Coase's (1937) theory of the firm to study public good provision. It compares three methods of public good provision: (1) collective provision, where users organize themselves to jointly finance the public good which is produced by a specialized firm; (2) market provision...

Yang's theory of economic specialization under increasing returns to scale (Yang, 2001) is a formal development of the fundamental Smith-Young theorem on the extent of the market and the social division of labor. In this theory, specialization — and thus, the social division of labor — is...

In the paper, the concept of Walrasian sequential equilibrium is developed to formalize the notions of fundamental social and endogenous uncertainties and decentralized social learning. It predicts that social sequential experiments with efficient as well as inefficient network patterns of...

No abstract received.

Classical trade theory is based on exogenous comparative advantage. The existence of equilibrium is derived under the assumption that the output sets are (weakly) convex. In general, however, in the presence of transaction costs or in the case of production techniques with increasing returns to...