Standard models of economic development typically ignore geography and transport. In this paper, we argue that we should model the transport sector, as it plays a quantitatively important role.\\ To understand what will determine the importance of the transport sector, consider the transport...

The theoretical debate over whether countries can and should set tariffs in response to export elasticities goes back over a century to the writings of Edgeworth (1894) and Bickerdike (1907). Despite the optimal tariff argument's centrality in debates over trade policy, there exists no evidence...

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...

In this paper I examine the effects of international technological competition on innovation, growth, and optimal R&D subsidies. I focus on a particular dimension of competition: the share of industries where domestic and foreign research firms compete for innovation. In a version of the...