Does trade within a country affect welfare and productivity? What are the magnitude and consequences of costs to such trade? To answer these questions, we exploit unique Canadian data to measure internal trade costs in a variety of ways – they are large, and vary across sectors and...

With a substantial fraction of the population insulated from energy price signals in bulk-metered apartment and condominium buildings, some jurisdictions are exploring mandatory metering of individual suites to encourage electricity conservation. This study finds that sub-metering in a Toronto...

Regional income inequality within countries is an important contributor to global income inequality. I investigate its relationship with structural change and growth using the historical experience of the United States since 1880. Specifically, I modify an existing multi-sector general...

Why do some regions grow faster than others? More precisely, why do rates of convergence differ? Recent research points to labour market frictions as a possible answer. This paper expands along this line by investigating how these labour market frictions interact with regional migration....

This paper finds an important relationship between the international food trade and cross-country income and productivity differences. Poor countries have low labour productivity in agriculture relative to other sectors, yet predominantly consume domestically-produced food. To understand these...

Firm-level idiosyncratic policy distortions lower aggregate productivity, especially if such distortions are correlated with firm productivity. Many environmental policies, such as energy intensity standards, exhibit this correlation. In contrast to the existing environmental literature...

International trade increases productivity; internal trade should too. The size and consequences of internal trade barriers are unfortunately not well known. Using unique Canadian data and multiple approaches to measure trade costs, we find internal trade barriers are large, especially for poor...

International trade and the internal movement of goods and people are closely related. China – increasingly open and with massive internal migration flows – provides an ideal setting to study these interrelationships. We develop a general equilibrium model of internal and external...