Forward-looking investments determine the resilience of firms' supply chains. Such investments confer externalities on other firms in the production network. We compare the equilibrium and optimal allocations in a general equilibrium model with an arbitrary number of vertical production tiers....

Polities differ in the extent to which political parties can pre-commit to carry out promised policy actions if they take power. Commitment problems may arise due to a divergence between the ex ante incentives facing national parties that seek to capture control of the legislature and the ex...

We develop a novel model of campaigns, elections, and policymaking in which the ex ante objectives of national party leaders differ from the ex post objectives of elected legislators. This generates a distinction between "policy rhetoric" and "policy reality" and introduces an important role for...

We examine integration strategies of multinational firms that face a rich array of choices of international organization. Each firm in an industry must provide headquarter services from its home country, produce intermediate inputs, and assemble the intermediate goods into final products. Both...

We characterize trade policies that result from political competition when assessments of well-being include both material and psychosocial components. The material component reflects, as usual, satisfaction from consumption. Borrowing from social identity theory, we take the psychosocial...

This paper reviews the literature on governments' motivations for negotiating and joining international trade agreements. I discuss both normative explanations for trade agreements and explanations based on political-economy concerns. Most of the paper focuses on the purpose of multilateral...

The evidence for the United States points to balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor less than one. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawa's theorem to show that the introduction of human...

We introduce firm and worker heterogeneity into a model of innovation-driven endogenous growth. Individuals who differ in ability sort into either a research sector or a manufacturing sector that produces differentiated goods. Each research project generates a new variety of the differentiated...

We develop a neoclassical trade model with heterogeneous factors of production. We consider a world with two factors, labor and "managers", each with a distribution of ability levels. Production combines a manager of some type with a group of workers. The output of a unit depends on the types of...

In this paper, I survey the recent theoretical literature that incorporates heterogeneous labor into models of international trade. The models with heterogeneous labor have been used to study how talent dispersion can be a source of comparative advantage, how the opening of trade affects the...