In a recent paper, Barrett (2006) reaches the conclusion that in general the answer to the question in the title is no. We show in this paper that a focus on the R&D phase in the development of breakthrough technologies changes the picture. The stability of international treaties improves and...

The accumulation of international reserves by emerging markets raises the question of how to best utilize these funds. This paper explores two routes through which the pooling of reserves could enhance stability and welfare. First, the reserve pool could be used for emergency lending in response...

Different countries have been following different reform paths since the early 1990s. We develop a simple dynamic model of policy reform that captures some of the determinants that underlie these differences. The model emphasizes the interaction between domestic institutions and international...

Achieving efficiency for many global environmental problems requires voluntary cooperation among sovereign countries due to the public good nature of pollution abatement. The theory of international environmental agreements (IEAs) in economics seeks to understand how cooperation among countries...

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...

This paper studies the effect of foreign aid on economic stabilization. Following Alesina and Drazen (1991), we model the delay in stabilizing as the result of a distributional struggle: reforms are postponed because they are costly and each distributional faction hopes to reduce its share of...

Recent federal cut-backs of financial support for undergraduates have worsened the financial position of colleges and universities and required them to debate how they will allocate their scarce financial aid resources.Our paper contributes to the debate by providing a model of optimal financial...

We document that, in rural Uganda, the entry of foreign aid reduces government provision of similar services because the organization that delivers aid often hires the government worker, thereby reducing state capacity. Access to any public services and population well-being worsen in villages...

This paper shows that general equilibrium effects can partly rationalize the high correlation between saving and investment rates observed in OECD countries. We find that once controlling for general equilibrium effects the saving-retention coefficient remains high in the 70's but decreases...