Estimates of the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign varieties are small in macroeconomic data, and substantially larger in disaggregated studies. This may be an artifact of heterogeneity. We use disaggregated multilateral trade data to structurally identify elasticities of...

This paper presents an empirical examination of the importance of hysteresis in international trade. An econometric model of export determination is developed where the presence of sunk costs causes discontinuous behaviour and hysteresis so that an individual exporter’s decision to stay in or...

Models with externalities have become increasingly popular for studying both long-term growth and business-cycle fluctuations. Externalities can lead to indeterminacy, allowing self-fulfilling expectations to determine the equilibrium. This paper argues that the importance of indeterminacy might...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...