The paper presents a model of a monetary union designed to illuminate monetary and exchange rate policy in the West African Monetary Union (UMOA). Emphasis is placed on the interaction of the members of UMOA with each other, through the common central bank, and on their interaction with France...

What prevents the spread of information among coworkers, and which management practices facilitate workplace knowledge flows? We conducted a field experiment in a sales company, addressing these questions with three active treatments. (1) Encouraging workers to talk about their sales techniques...

The Melitz model highlights the importance of the extensive margin (the number of firms exporting) for trade flows. Using the World Bank's Exporter Dynamics Database (EDD) featuring firm-level exports from 50 countries, we find that around 50% of variation in exports is along the extensive...

This paper develops and estimates a model of indivisibilities in shipping and economies of scale in consolidation. It uses highly detailed data on imports for which it is possible to observe the contents of individual containers. In the model, a firm is able to adapt to indivisibility...

The elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods is one of the most important parameters in international economics. The international macro literature, which is primarily concerned with short-run business cycle fluctuations, assigns a low value to this parameter. The international...

Nearly half of all transactions in the $5 trillion market for manufactured goods in the United States were intermediated by wholesalers in 2012, up from 32 percent in 1992. Seventy percent of this increase is due to the growth of "superstar" firms - the largest one percent of wholesalers....

With the rise of social media and streaming platforms, firms and brand-owners increasingly depend on influencers to attract consumers, who care about both common product quality and consumer-influencer interaction. Sellers thus compete in both influencer and product markets. As outreach and...

Using two decades of data from twelve low-income countries in West Africa, we show that dust carried by harmattan trade winds increases infant and child mortality. Health investments respond to dust exposure, consistent with compensating behaviors. Despite these efforts, surviving children still...

Liberalization of tropical agricultural markets has brought globalization, in the sense that all producers now face world rather than domestic prices. Producer prices have tended to rise as a share of fob prices as intermediation costs and tax has declined. However, in conjunction with inelastic...

One of the great puzzles of Sub-Saharan African economic history is that wheeled transportation was barely used prior to the colonial period. Instead, head porterage was the main method of transportation. The consensus among historians is that this was a rational adaption to the underlying...