This paper incorporates competition for fiscal transfers (or, equivalently, rent seeking from state coffers) into a standard general equilibrium model of economic growth and endogenously chosen fiscal policy. The government generates tax revenues, but then each selfinterested individual agent...

In this paper, foreign aid transfers can distort individual incentives, and hence hurt growth, by encouraging rent-seeking as opposed to productive activities. We construct a model of a small growing open economy that distinguishes two effects from foreign transfers: (i) a direct positive...

This short paper reconsiders the popular result that the lower the probability of getting reelected, the stronger the incumbent politicians incentive to follow short-sighted, inefficient policies. The set-up is a general equilibrium model of endogenous growth and optimal fiscal policy, in which...

This paper shows that whether pollution occurs as a by-product of economic activity (which is supposed to be the case in DCs), or as resource extraction (which is supposed to be the case in LDCs), matters for the dynamics of the optimal growth-environment-policy link. The context is a dynamic...

This paper studies the difference between public production and public finance of public goods in a dynamic general equilibrium setup. By public finance, we mean that the public good is produced by private providers with the government financing their costs. When the model is calibrated to match...

We propose a short-run model of the extensive margin of trade and deploy it to distinguish and quantify domestic and cross-border margins. Our empirical focus is on the domestic extensive margin of trade (domestic distribution of a product) and its importance for quantifying policy and...

Short run gravity is a geometric weighted average of long run gravity and bilateral capacity. The model features (i) joint trade costs endogenous to bilateral volumes, (ii) long run gravity as a limiting case of effcient investment in bilateral capacities, (iii) a structural ratio of short run...