We integrate strategic-trade and political-economy considerations in a unified framework to analyze unilateral trade policy. Foreign firms compete on Home´s market through export or foreign direct investment (FDI). They also lobby Home´s government which sets trade (tariff) and industrial...

Over the 400 years covered by this study European grain markets became increasingly integrated as measured by the speed of adjustment back to equilibrium after a shock. Market integration smoothened local supply shocks and therefore generated price stability which can be seen as having a...

The paper analyzes the long century of deregulation of European grain markets. Eighteen century reformers won the intellectual battle as to the merits of laissez-faire markets for grain but failed to convince the angry crowds which were alerted by temporary increases in prices. Not until falling...

This paper argues that the appropriate standard for the analysis of commodity market integration is the transport cost adjusted law of one price. A threshold error correction model that incorporates that property is developed and applied to French wheat prices in the 19th century. This type of...

By documenting the legislative history of the Corn Laws from 1670 and using previously unused data to calculate annual Ad Valorem Equivalents for most years from 1814, it is possible to establish several important facts about British wheat protection. Statutory protection was only significant...

The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition how the private provision of public goods is affected when it is embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on public goods production, which Olson...

Economic theory and empirical studies consistently support the case for free trade. With such a point of departure, the difficulties concluding the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and the widespread use of protectionist measures in general seem paradoxical. However, through the introduction...

The author studies the effect of immigration on world welfare. The world consists of two areas, South and North, the former populated by low-skill workers, and the latter by low- and high-skill workers. Immigrants from the South to the North have two effects in the North: a mixed native-foreign...

We investigate experimentally the effects of corrupt experts on information aggregation in committees. We find that non-experts are significantly less likely to delegate through abstention when there is a probability that experts are corrupt. Such decreased abstention, when the probability of...

The ability of groups to implement efficiency-enhancing institutions is emerging as a central theme of research in economics. This paper explores voting on a scheme of intergroup competition which facilitates cooperation in a social dilemma situation. Experimental results show that the...