The welfare effects of trade shocks depend crucially on the nature and magnitude of the costs workers face in moving between sectors. The existing trade literature does not directly address this, assuming perfect mobility or complete immobility, or adopting reduced-form approaches to estimation....

We study a simple, tractable model of labor adjustment in a trade model that allows us to analyze the economy's dynamic response to trade liberalization. Since it is a neoclassical market-clearing model, we can use duality techniques to study the equilibrium, and despite its simplicity a rich...

We construct a dynamic, stochastic rational expectations model of labor reallocation within a trade model that is designed so that its key parameters can be estimated for trade policy analysis. A key feature is the presence of time-varying idiosyncratic moving costs faced by workers. As a...

Under the TRIPS agreement, WTO members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. The debate about the merits of this requirement has been extremely contentious. Many low income economies claim that patent protection for pharmaceuticals will result in substantially higher...

Governments often prohibit resale of the benefits-in-kind provided by antipoverty programs. Yet the personal gains from those benefits are likely to vary and to be known privately, so there can be gains to poor people from trading their assignments. We know very little about those gains. To help...

Low response rates among rich households are thought to be a serious problem in many applications using household surveys. The paper discusses the various ways the problem can be dealt with, and makes some recommendations for practice, including in developing countries. Under certain conditions,...

Thirty years of distributional data are used to study the short-term impacts of popular macroeconomic indicators on real household incomes from the poorest to the richest Americans. The appropriate weights on unemployment versus inflation vary across the distribution. The unemployment rate...

Ethnic riots broke out in Malaysia in 1969, prompting a national effort at affirmative action favoring the poorer (majority) of "Bumiputera" (mainly Malays). Since then, Malaysia's official poverty measures indicate one of the fastest long-term rates of poverty reduction in the world, due to...

Evidence on the implementation of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act suggests that the available work is often rationed by local leaders in poor areas, and that this is an important factor limiting the scheme's impact on poverty. The paper offers explanations for this empirical...

The paper critically assesses prevailing measures of global poverty. A welfarist interpretation of global poverty lines is augmented by the idea of normative functionings, the cost of which varies across countries. In this light, current absolute measures are seen to ignore important social...