Income disparity across countries has been large and widening over time. We develop a tractable model where factor requirements in production technology do not necessarily match a country's factor input profile. Appropriate assimilation of frontier technologies balances such multi-dimensional...

To explore the interplays between trade and institutions, we construct a staged development framework with multi-period discrete choices to study the colonization of Hong Kong, which served to facilitate the trade of several agricultural and manufactured products, including opium, between...

We develop a framework of group corruption via back-door negotiations between an outside initiator and an authority of decision-makers in a hierarchical organization. We examine the role played by the architecture of a multi-tier authority and determine under such a structure how bargaining...

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign technology adoption, incorporating adoption barriers, international technology spillover, and relative price advantages. A higher FDI conversion efficacy, a lower adoption barrier, or a stronger...

Observing the increasingly important roles played by the creation and transmission of information and tacit knowledge, we construct an information-network model incorporating both information transmitters and information aggregators. Given information-processing roles in aggregation or...

To fill the knowledge gap that previous studies ignore either housing or internal urban structure and to enable better fit with important stylized facts, we construct a two-sector optimal growth model of housing where housing is produced by land and housing structure/household durables. We...

Science parks play a growing in knowledge-based economies by accommodating high-tech firms and providing an environment that fosters location-dependent knowledge spillovers and promote R&D investments by firms. Yet, not much is known about the economic conditions under which such entities may...

In a second-best optimal growth setup with only factor taxes, it is in general optimal to fully replace capital by labor income taxation in the long run. We revisit this important issue by developing a human capital-based endogenous growth model with frictional labor search, allowing each firm...

While minimum wage policy is widely adopted in the real world, can it effectively raise the average wage of lower paid jobs without having large detrimental consequences for employment? The empirical literature fails to establish robust findings. We develop a general-equilibrium search and...

If international trade is strictly trade in intermediate goods, would the common presumption, that small, less developed economies (the South) lose from trade wars still be true? We address this question by constructing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the North and the South trade...