Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes...

We present a new data set we built based on Swiss rich lists going back to 1989. We show, among other things, that 60% of the super-rich are heirs-a fraction twice as large as in the US-and that wealth mobility at the very top has declined significantly. We find that top 0.01% wealth shares are...

We analyze the interaction of firm product quality and pricing decisions with financial distress and bankruptcy in the airline industry. We consider an airline's choices of quality and price as dynamic decisions that trade off current cash flows for future revenue. We examine how airline...

This paper uncovers new stylized facts on the relation between economic integration and world trade prices. Using export price data combined with data on 32 WTO (World Trade Organization) accessions by developing countries and hundreds of new PTAs (Preferential Trade Agreements), we show that a...

We consider dynamic competition among platforms in a market with network externalities. A platform that dominated the market in the previous period becomes "focal" in the current period, in that agents play the equilibrium in which they adopt the focal platform whenever such equilibrium exists....

The unit values of internationally traded goods are heavily influenced by quality. We model this in an extended monopolistic competition framework where, in addition to choosing price, firms simultaneously choose quality. We allow countries to have non-homothetic demand for quality. The optimal...

Not surprisingly, big countries trade more than small countries. In this paper we use data on shipments by 110 exporters to 59 importers in 5,000 product categories to ask: how? Do big countries trade larger quantities of a common set of goods (the intensive margin), a larger set of goods (the...

This paper studies price and quality differences across international intermediate input suppliers. We develop price measures that account for (i) differences in product characteristics, (ii) unobserved quality differences, and (iii) pure (frictional) price dispersion across suppliers. Using...

This paper develops a theoretical foundation for the social cost of carbon (SCC). The model highlights the source of debate over whether countries should use the global or domestic SCC for regulatory impact analysis. I identify conditions under which a country's decision to internalize the...

The objective of this paper is to critically assess the use simple rules for the social cost of carbon (SCC) employing a rudimentary form of the Ramsey rule. Two interrelated caveats apply. First, if climate change poses a serious problem, it is hard to justify an exogenous constant growth rate...