This paper develops a simple model of international trade with intermediation. We consider an economy with two islands and two types of agents, farmers and traders. Farmers can produce two goods, but in order to sell these goods in centralized (Walrasian) markets, they need to be matched with a...

The fiscal gains from, and hence the political incentives for, an increase in the inflation rate of ten percentage points may be substantial: Swedish data from 1994 suggests an annual real flow of 3–4% of GDP, or a capitalized value of nearly 100% of GDP. These gains would have arisen mainly...

This Paper introduces the concepts of direct and indirect factor trade utility functions and uses them to derive Marshallian and Hicksian factor content functions, which express the quantities of factors embodied in net exports as a function of the economy's factor prices and endowments. The...

This Paper investigates the welfare effects of trade liberalization by exploiting a natural policy experiment in the small open economy of Cyprus. A 1993 law relaxed import restrictions on used vehicles and facilitated the flow of used Japanese vehicles into the country. This led to a dramatic...

In models with heterogeneous firms trade integration has a positive impact on aggregate productivity through the selection of the best firms as import competition drives the least productive ones out of the market. To quantify the impact of firm selection on productivity, we calibrate and...

The paper examines the welfare gains from North-South trade and their distribution. We construct an endogenous growth North-South model with four Southern stages of development as possible equilibria: specialisation in a traditional good; the South in addition copies Northern high-tech...

We present a method for identifying and estimating the gains from trade in limit order markets and provide new empirical evidence that the limit order market is a good market design. The gains from trade in our model arise because traders have different valuations for the stock. We use...

This paper adds a highly-leveraged financial sector to the Ramsey model of economic growth and shows that this causes the economy to behave in a highly volatile manner: doing this strongly augments the macroeconomic effects of aggregate productivity shocks. Our model is built on the financial...