We take up again the famous case of the trade in wheat between the United States and the United Kingdom. This is often used to illustrate the so-called first era of globalization at the end of the nineteenth century. This study, however, finds evidence of transatlantic commodity market...

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political-economy model that suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

Even though formal property rights are the theoretical response to open access involving natural and environmental resources, they typically are adopted late after considerable waste has been endured. Instead, the usual response in local, national, and international settings is to rely upon...

How does the interplay of geography and political-economic forces affect the shape of nations? This paper presents a quantitative framework for characterizing the equilibrium evolution of national boundaries in a world with a rich geography. The framework delivers simple equilibrium conditions...

Trade theorists have come to understand that their theory is ambiguous on the question: are trade and factor flows substitutes? While this sounds like an open invitation for empirical research, hardly any serious econometric work has appeared in the literature. This paper uses history to fill...

Sustainable energy systems of the future will need more than efficient, clean, low-cost, renewable energy sources; they will also need efficient price signals that motivate sustainable energy consumption as well as a better real-time alignment of energy demand and supply. The Power Trading Agent...

This paper uses a new model of a competitive electricity market to investigate the role of storage in markets dominated by hydro generation. Competition among generators leads to an endogenous shadow price of stored water, which facilitates the efficient intra-day and inter-season substitution...

We investigate efficiency properties of binary ecolabels in a homogeneous good market with heterogeneous consumers. Faced with the minimum technology standard, firms make endogenous entry, certification, and price/quantity decisions. We consider both perfect and imperfect competition with or...

Export restrictions can be problematic if trading partners question either their conformity with international obligations or their possibly unintended negative impacts on others. Regulatory transparency can help. This paper examines how three multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs)...