This paper identifies a new reason for giving preferences to the disadvantaged using a model of contests. There are two forces at work: the effort effect working against giving preferences and the selection effect working for them. When education is costly and easy to obtain (as in the U.S.),...

This paper looks at some consequences of a comittment to wage equality in some sectors of the economy which produce lumpy consumer goods. We show that in this setting, there are two equilibria, with high or low wages, incomes and output. In this closed economy, growth may be immiserizing. We...

This paper asks whether the results obtained from using the standard approach to testing the influential Grossman and Helpman "protection for sale" (PFS) model of political economy might arise from a simpler setting. A model of imports and quotas with protection occuring in response to import...

This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organizations. We formally show that the PFS model provides the following prediction: In the...

This paper critically and selectively surveys the literature on protection for sale and discusses directions for future research in this area. It suggests that the standard approach needs to be augmented to provide more compelling tests of this model.