Theories of growth and international trade are reviewed critically from the perspective of understanding persistent inter-country and inter-regional income inequality. Three separate literatures are considered for the insights they offer about international disparity: Classical political...

We extend the empirical literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) by showing the legal origin matters for the evolution of environmental quality. Using observations of ambient sulfur dioxide levels, we find that the EKC for French and British legal origin countries diverge as incomes...

We consider intellectual property rights (IPRs) in a Schumpeterian growth model in which patent holders face the threats of profit loss due to imitation and complete valuation loss due to outside innovation. We disaggregate IPR policies by distinguishing between the quality of the IPR regime and...

Reliance on a Dixit-Stiglitz production function leads the growth literature naïvely to associate economic scale with the size of a country's population. I develop an alternative approach in which market size is endogenous, reflecting a trade-off between the gains to exploiting non-rival skills...

Please do note quote without permission of author. - This paper constructs a simple model that can account for both the negative relationship between growth and income inequality observed in the cross-country data and the positive relationship observed within countries over time. The model...

A formalization of the Coase-Williamson-Cheung theory of the firm is used to examine the trade-off between the firm and the market as institutions for organizing production in a dynamic, general equilibrium model with increasing returns to labor specialization. The model considers the...

The paper develops a dynamic, general equilibrium model of specialization-driven growth in which the private cost of coordinating among specialists is a function of public expenditure on physical and institutional infrastructure. Growth is characterized by endogenous increases in labor...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model endogenizing labor specialization, firm size, firm specialization, interfirm trade, and economic fragmentation. In contrast to the standard neoinstitutionalist understanding of firms and markets as substitutes in organizing production, firms and...