Efforts to estimate the effects of international trade on a country's real income have been hampered by the failure to account for the endogeneity of trade. Frankel and Romer recently use a country's geographic attributes - notably its distance from potential trading partners - as an instrument...

A model of a labor market is proposed where the level of individual talent can only be learned on the job and where job positions are scarce. Inability to commit to long-term contracts leaves firms with insufficient incentives to hire novices, causing them to bid excessively for the pool of...

This paper studies a two-sector model of learning-by-doing that is partially transferable between sectors. There is a potential efficiency gain from intersectoral turnover when the sectors have different complementary production costs or learning curves of different steepness. If workers are...

In medicine, law, consulting, and many other careers, a significant proportion of human capital is created through profession-specific learning-by-doing (LBD. In the absence of long-term wage contracts, if LDB effects are sufficiently large, then young workers should face a negative wage in...

This paper presents an assignment model of CEOs and firms. The distributions of CEO pay levels and firms' market values are analyzed as the competitive equilibrium of a matching market where talents, as well as CEO positions, are scarce. It is shown how the observed joint distribution of CEO pay...

We study the returns to political office using data from Finnish parliamentary elections in 1970-2007 and municipal elections in 1996-2008. The discontinuity of electoral outcomes in individual candidate votes allows us to estimate the causal effect of being electedon subsequent income. Getting...

In order to help understand adherence to moral standards and the force of intrinsic motivation, we present an infinite-horizon model where an individual receives random temptations (such as bribe offers) and must decide which to resist. Temptations yield consumption value, but keeping a good...

This paper provides a historical look at how the multilateral trading system has coped with the challenge of shocks and shifts. By shocks we mean sudden jolts to the world economy in the form of financial crises and deep recessions, or wars and political conflicts. By shifts we mean slow-moving,...

The author argues that a tax on imports commensurately creates a tax on exports, and that trade imbalances reflect capital flows between countries.

The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a...