This paper investigates the institutional causes of China's Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered...

We study the evolution of market-oriented policies over time and across countries. We consider a model in which own and neighbors' past experiences influence policy choices, through their effect on policymakers' beliefs. We estimate the model using a large panel of countries. We find that there...

We analyze consequences of changing the terms of trade between agriculture and industry on capital accumulation and on welfare of workers in different sectors. The issue was central to Soviet industrialization debate and it remains important in today's developing world. Through a simple general...

The paper considers issues in recent research on macroeconomic equilibrium in centrally planned economies. I defend the explicit aggregative , macroeconomic approach in theory, institutional relationships and measurement. It has offered a fresh, coherent framework for analysis of many CPE...

This empirical study stresses the underlying macroeconomic forces which determine foreign trade flows in CPEs. The general specification includes a planners' demand equation for the volume of imports, a planners' supply equation for the volume of exports, and a rest-of-world demand equation for...

This paper studies how stable over time are the so-called "structural parameters" of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. To answer this question, we estimate a medium-scale DSGE model with real and nominal rigidities using U.S. data. In our model, we allow for parameter...

Proponents of globalization often conclude that its critics are ignorant or self-motivated. In doing so, they have missed a valuable opportunity to discover both how best to communicate the benefits of globalization, and how to improve on the current model of globalization. This paper examines...

A bona fide currency functions as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, but bitcoin largely fails to satisfy these criteria. Bitcoin has achieved only scant consumer transaction volume, with an average well below one daily transaction for the few merchants who accept it....

Over the past thirty years, a great deal of business cycle research has been based on purely real models that abstract from the presence of nominal rigidities, and so (at least implicitly) assume that the Phillips curve is vertical. In this paper, I show that such models are fragile, in the...

Since Wakefield et al. (1998), the public was exposed to mixed information surrounding the claim that measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism. A persistent trend to delay the vaccination during 1998–2011 in the US was driven by children of college-educated mothers, suggesting that these...