What tariffs would countries impose if they did not have to fear any retaliation? What would occur if there was a complete breakdown of trade policy cooperation? What would be the outcome if countries engaged in fully efficient trade negotiations? And what would happen to trade policy...

We illuminate the relationship between optimal firm pricing and optimal trade policy by exploring a generalized model that accommodates product differentiation at both the national and sub-national (firm) levels. We assume monopolistic competition in the differentiated products at the...

This paper shows that the results of Venables (1987) depend critically on the assumption that there are no fixed costs of trade. The introduction of fixed costs of exporting, while making the model more consistent with the empirical evidence, leads to the opposite conclusion that technological...

Mutual causation of predation and trade induces novel effects of commercial policy in this paper. The model can explain trade volume responses to market widening initiatives that are otherwise puzzlingly 'too big' or 'too small'. Efficient commercial policy (broadly defined) depends crucially on...

Uneven development within countries suggests that domestic trade frictions are important. Trade flows within a country, however, are rarely observed. We employ a new dataset on trade between fifteen Chinese treaty ports to examine the importance of domestic frictions around the year 1900. The...

The separation of ownership and control allows controlling shareholders to pursue private benefits. We develop an analytically tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study asset pricing and welfare implications of imperfect investor protection. Consistent with empirical...

Our simple model features agents heterogeneous in skill and risk aversion, incomplete financial markets, and redistributive taxation. In equilibrium, agents become entrepreneurs if their skill is sufficiently high or risk aversion sufficiently low. Under heavier taxation, entrepreneurs are more...

The non-pecuniary benefits of managing a small business are a first order consideration for many nascent entrepreneurs, yet the preference for business ownership is mostly ignored in models of entrepreneurship and occupational choice. In this paper, we study a population with varying...