There is a consensus among economists that a carbon tax is the best approach for addressing the effects of CO2 emissions on the global climate. However, past international agreements on climate change instead specify caps on emissions (a quantity target) for each country. This paper explores...

This paper rethinks the design of the income tax by assuming that the objective of the tax is not to redistribute from rich to poor but instead to provide some insurance to individuals against the uncertainties they face in their future earnings, a motivation for the tax proposed in Buchanan...

Addressing public health externalities often requires community-level collective action. Each person's sanitation behavior can affect the health of neighbors. We report on a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted with 19,000 households in rural Bangladesh where we randomized (1) either...

This paper takes a novel approach to trying to disentangle the impact of globalization on wages by focusing on changes in the return to speaking English, the international language of commerce, in South Africa as that country re-integrated with the global economy after 1993. The paper finds that...

This paper is about jobs and international trade. It is about what researchers can learn of the relationship between the two using firm-level data. It is about the particular experience of Chile following a broad trade liberalization and spanning significant macroeconomic contraction and...

This paper tries to make sense of the recent trade dispute between the U.S. and Japan in autos and auto parts. The paper argues that there are structural differences between the way that the auto industries are organized in the U.S. and Japan, and that these differences have contributed to the...

This paper presents a non-technical discussion of economic issues that arise due to links between competition (or anti-trust) policy and international trade. While recent advances in international trade theory have borrowed heavily from the industrial organization literature, this work has a...