We consider the design and implementation of international trade agreements when: (i) negotiations are undertaken and commitments made in the presence of uncertainty about future political pressures; (ii) governments possess private information about political pressures at the time that the...

Motivated by the structure of WTO negotiations, we analyze a bargaining environment in which negotiations proceed bilaterally and sequentially under the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle. We identify backward-stealing and forward-manipulation problems that arise when governments bargain under...

We test the view the large differences in income levels we see across the world are due to differences in underlying characteristics, i.e. fundamental forces, against the alternative that there are poverty traps. Taking geographical variables as fundamental characteristics, we find that we can...

Technological diffusion implies a form of 'conditional convergence' as lagging countries catch up with technological leaders. We find strong evidence of technological diffusion but not full convergence; differences in total factor productivity (TFP) persist even in the long run due to differences...

Macroeconomists acknowledge the contribution of human capital to economic growth, but their empirical studies define human capital solely in terms of schooling. In this paper, we extend production function models of economic growth to account for two additional variables that microeconomists...

We describe recent work on the theory of trade agreements that speaks to the purpose and design of GATT. Our discussion proceeds in three steps. First, we examine the purpose of a trade agreement. In both the traditional economic and the political-economy approaches to the study of trade...

Empirical studies have repeatedly documented the countercyclical nature of trade barriers. In this paper, we propose a simple theoretical framework that is consistent with this and other empirical regularities in the relationship between protection and the business cycle. We examine the ability...

This study examines the claim that the AIDS epidemic will slow the pace of economic growth. We do this by examining the association, across fifty-one developing and industrial countries for which we were able to assemble data, between changes in the prevalence of AIDS and the rate of growth of...

We present a theory of collusive pricing in markets subject to business cycle fluctuations. In the business cycle model that we adopt, market demand alternates stochastically between fast-growth (boom) and slow-growth (recession) phases. We provide a complete characterization of the...