AbstractThis paper examines various implications of preferential trade agreements, namely customs unions and free trade areas, in the context of a multicountry general equilibrium model. The model is calibrated to represent countries with symmetric endowments, and aggregate and disaggregate...

AbstractThis paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in African countries. We construct a quantitative, stochastic, dynamic, multi-sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a "typical" African country. External shocks...

AbstractThe welfare effects of partial restrictions on political competition are investigated in a model in which two candidates receive campaign contributions from import-competing industries in return for tariff protection. Ceilings on allowable contributions per industry may be...

AbstractWe analyze a two country-two good model of international trade in which citizens in each country differ by their specific factor endowments. The trade policy in each country is set by the politician who has been elected by the citizens in a previous stage. Due to a delegation effect...

AbstractCustoms union formation is modeled as a two-stage game. In the first stage countries make coalitional choices according to core theory. In the second stage optimal tariffs are determined. This yields a theory that predicts which customs unions form. An example shows that a customs union...

AbstractWe develop a two-country, two-sector model of trade where the only difference between the two countries is their distribution of human capital endowments. We show that even if the two countries have identical aggregate human capital endowments the pattern of trade depends on the...

AbstractThe paper studies a simple voting system that can increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency or treating voters asymmetrically. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions and thus elicit voters'...

AbstractWe construct a stochastic model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system. We model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents as an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game. The game has a stationary equilibrium with the property that the...

AbstractThis paper uses computational techniques to assess whether or not various propositions that have been advanced as plausible in the literature on regional trade agreements may actually hold. The idea is to make probabilistic statements as to whether propositions of interest might hold,...

AbstractIn this paper we develop a three-country-three-good model of customs unions. The main result is that a sufficient condition for two countries to benefit from forming a customs union is that they are similar in the sense that their mutual trade is small. This result is obtained by...