I examine the causes and the consequences of differences in labor market outcomes across local labor markets within a country. The focus is on a long-run general equilibrium setting, where workers and firms are free to move across localities and local prices adjust to maintain the spatial...

We use a North-South model with property right differences and resource dynamics to study the effects of trade on resource use and welfare. Autarky is likely to Pareto-dominate free trade in the long run when the environment is quite fragile, and the result is reversed when the environment is...

This paper simulates the costs of the US-Japan auto VER. Under a standard constant returns to scale (CRTS) formulation, the costs are estimated at about $10 billion. It then sequentially introduces important features of the auto VER: endogenous rent premium determination, wage distortions in...

This paper considers the generalized second-best analytics of optimal restructuring under a political constraint, building on the modelling approach in Dehejia (1997). It is shown that the second-best optimum entails administering the terms-of-trade shock fully at the initiation of the reform,...

We examine the sales of French manufacturing firms in 113 destinations, including France itself. Several regularities stand out: (1) the number of French firms selling to a market, relative to French market share, increases systematically with market size; (2) sales distributions are very similar...

A large literature has documented a significant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a...

We present in this paper a bench-mark model for the optimal speed of transition from a state-owned to a private market economy, based on the consumption-savings decision in a closed economy. This bench-mark model abstracts from rigidities or frictions to focus on the macroeconomic conditions for...