Researchers have estimated productivity changes surrounding trade liberalization for different countries, using different techniques, and have generally reached the conclusion that gains are positive. In this paper we study how different techniques influence the quantitative results by...

We address the question of whether growth and welfare can be higher in crisis prone economies. First, we show that there is a robust empirical link between per-capita GDP growth and negative skewness of credit growth across countries with active financial markets. That is, countries that have...

We present a model in which capital assets can only be owned by members of a small politically-connected elite ("the oligarchs"), each member of which faces a given risk of being expropriated, and we investigate the implications of such an imperfection of property rights for the transition to a...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of North-South trade. Northern firms devote resources to innovative R&D to discover higher quality products and Southern firms devote resources to imitative R&D to copy state-of-the-art quality products. Both innovation and imitation rates...

TB

This paper presents a stylized model of international trade and asset price bubbles. Its central insight is that bubbles tend to appear and expand in countries where productivity is low relative to the rest of the world. These bubbles absorb local savings, eliminating inefficient investments and...

The empirical evidence is such that countries with better developed financial markets gain significantly from FDI. This paper formalizes the mechanism through which the trickle down effect of FDI depends on the extent of the development of the domestic financial sector. We model a small open...