This paper provides a selective survey of over half a century of research linking the neoclassical trade model to the data. Three lessons stand out. First, competitive and new trade theory models are complementary rather than competing ways to look at many existing empirical regularities....

In this paper, we apply a convex hull approach to counterfactual analysis of trade openness and growth. The experiments we choose evaluate the importance of trade openness for growth across African countries. Specifically, we ask the question what would happen if African countries were more...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

We explore the interrelationships between various measures of cultural distance. We first discuss measures of genetic distance, used in the recent economics literature to capture the degree of relatedness between countries. We next describe several classes of measures of lin-guistic, religious,...

A substantial amount of money is spent on technology by schools, families and policymakers with the hope of improving educational outcomes. This chapter explores the theoretical and empirical literature on the impacts of technology on educational outcomes. The literature focuses on two primary...

An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

Globalization is blamed for many socio-economic shortcomings. I discuss the consequences of globalization by surveying the empirical globalization literature. My focus is on the KOF indices of globalization (Dreher 2006a and Dreher et al. 2008a), that have been used in more than 100 studies....

We study competition among a score of firms participating in an online market for a commodity computer component. Firms were able to adjust prices continuously; prices determined how the firms were ranked and listed (lowest price listed first), with better ranks contributing to firms' sales....

While the theoretical literature on contracts has been enormous since the seventies, empirical tests of the theory have long remained scarce. However, new empirical work has been developed in the last ten years that sheds light on the empirical validation of the theory. This paper aims at...

Customs data reveal heterogeneity and granularity of relationships among buyers and sellers. A key insight is how more exports to a destination break down into more firms selling there and more buyers per exporter. We develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of firm-to-firm matching...