We estimate the interrelationships among economic institutions, political institutions, openness, and income levels, using identification through heteroskedasticity (IH). We split our cross-national dataset into two sub-samples: (i) colonies versus non-colonies; and (ii) continents aligned on an...

This paper quantifies the gains from openness arising from trade and multinational production (MP). We present a model that captures key dimensions of the interaction between these two flows: Trade and MP are competing ways to serve a foreign market; MP relies on imports of intermediate goods...

This paper integrates in a unified and tractable framework some of the key insights of the field of international trade and economic growth. It examines a sequence of theoretical models that share a common description of technology and preferences but differ on their assumptions about trade...

Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) argue that the relation between openness and growth is still an open question. One of the main problems in the assessment of the effect is the endogeneity of the relation. In order to address this issue, this paper applies the identification through heteroskedasticity...

Exporting is often touted as a way to increase economic growth. This paper examines whether exporting has played any role in increasing productivity growth in U.S. manufacturing. Contemporaneous levels of exports and productivity are indeed positively correlated across manufacturing industries....

Many studies have found a positive correlation between trade and growth, but do not attempt to identify the economic mechanisms involved. This paper attempts to identify one of the mechanisms linking trade and growth. In particular, we present a novel theoretical model that establishes a link...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries? growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If "getting policies right" is wrong or infeasible,...

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly...

This paper shows that the asymptotic normal approximation is often insufficiently accurate for volatility estimators based on high frequency data. To remedy this, we compute Edgeworth expansions for such estimators. Unlike the usual expansions, we have found that in order to obtain meaningful...

Many dynamic problems in economics are characterized by large state spaces which make both computing and estimating the model infeasible. We introduce a method for approximating the value function of high-dimensional dynamic models based on sieves and establish results for the: (a) consistency,...