A striking pattern in transaction-level data is the concentration of international shipments in the hands of a few large firms. One common feature of dominating high-performance firms is that they produce multiple products and ship them to many destinations. Motivated by the emergence of highly...

What insights can be gained from bringing the theory of the firm to the global economy? I discuss several new features of the world economy that can be explained by incorporating the theory of the firm into the theory of international trade. Among the new features I discuss are the move to...

The classical Wage Fund (Capital or Credit) framework is integrated with the simplest text-book version of the Ricardian model of comparative advantage, generating a model that replicates important features of the neo-classical production theory involving capital and labour without neo-classical...

Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

We examine how populist governments influence political culture and economic outcomes. Some Austrian communities are governed by far-right populist mayors, directly elected by a majority of voters. We exploit close elections and find that the electorate becomes more polarized under populist...

There is a fundamental difference between the natural and the social sciences due to reactivity. This difference remains even in the age of Artificially Intelligent Learning Machines and Big Data. Many academic economists take it as a matter of course that economics should become a natural...

The economic tradition of ordoliberalism, understood as the theoretical and policy ideas of the Freiburg School, emerged in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In the years thereafter, it was quickly superseded by Keynesianism and other theories imported from the English-speaking world. The crisis in...

We develop a model of international trade between two symmetric countries that features inter-group inequality between entrepreneurs and workers, and also intra-group inequality within each of those two groups. Individuals in the economy are heterogeneous with respect to their entrepreneurial...