The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions. By accumulating votes on issues that it deems most...

This paper examines how impatience interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households (i.e., with intrinsic inequality), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households; (ii)...

We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. We use a...

In this paper we determine the main driving forces underlying the structural transformation and urbanization process in rapidly industrializing countries. We use a dynamic, small open economy model with an abundant supply of surplus labor in rural areas, two types of traded goods manufactured in...

Ronald W. Jones (2000) celebrated book has inspired a generation of work that has been devoted to understanding the causes and consequences of outsourcing. While much of this work has focused on the outsourcing versus domestic production decision of the firm with labor cost-saving as the key...

PTAs are generally negotiated without any tariff concessions or transfers to non-member countries. Can such a PTA benefit the neighbors' welfare? In a two-good competitive equilibrium model in the absence of an entrepôt, a PTA without concessions to the outside will hurt the outsider's welfare...

We develop a model of international trade with increasing returns to scale by taking into account the possibility of cooperation among agents in an egalitarian economy. It is shown that each country gains from trade in a trading world in which there are arbitrary numbers of...

In two-sector infinite-horizon trade models with factor–price-equalization, convergence of aggregate capital-labor ratios and incomes does not occur because the Euler equations imply equal growth rate of consumption in all economies. In a two-country dynamic specific factors model, we show...

This paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in African countries. We construct a quantitative, stochastic, dynamic, multi-sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a typical African economy. In our framework, external...

This paper examines the welfare implications of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) from the perspective of small countries in the context of a multi-country, general equilibrium model. We calibrate our model to represent one relatively small country and two symmetric big countries. We consider...