"In this paper we propose a new approach to international comparisons of real GDP measured from the output-side. The traditional Geary-Khamis system to measure real GDP from the expenditure-side is modified to include differences in the terms of trade between countries. It is shown that this...

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

We view the political process in China as trading off the social benefits of increased trade and foreign direct investment, against the losses incurred by state-owned enterprises due to such liberalization. A model drawing on Grossman and Helpman (1994, 1996) is used to derive an empirically...

This paper offers an explanation for the persistence observed in real exchange rate movements. The model combines pricing to market behavior with sticky prices generated by staggered contracts. A translog preference structure is sued to enhance both features. The paper finds that openness limits...

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real...

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

We examine the relationship between large firms and the rising profit share in a model that features oligopolistic competition and consumer heterogeneity. Conditional on the sales distribution, the presence of consumer heterogeneity increases the profit share because it increases firm-level...