By the beginning of year 2006, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, FTAA, will be launched. Mixed expectations and concerns about its effects on the individual economies have grown in the area since this process started in December, 1994. This paper aims to discuss a particular expectation - or...

Abstract We study the distributional and welfare implications of U.S. monetary policy shocks in a small open economy under the classic rules of an exchange rate peg and inflation targeting. In a model with heterogenous agents, we show that contractionary (expansionary) monetary policy shocks in...

To what extent does education alleviate income inequality induced by globalization? What are the corresponding intergenerational welfare implications? I incorporate human capital and capital accumulation into a dynamic multi-country general equilibrium model, and study the exact transitional...

We analyse how changes in international trade integration affect productivity and the functional income distribution. To account for endogeneity, we construct a leave-out measure for international trade integration for country-industry pairs using international input-output tables. First, we...

Early research has documented that the large scale equity market liberalizations of the last decade led the subsequent rise in aggregate equity indices, investment booms, capital flows and economic growth. An important and unaddressed issue is the normative question of whether and how these...

This paper discusses two issues in the relationship between inequality and economic growth: the data and the econometrics. We first review the inequality data set of Deininger and Squire, which, we argue, fails to provide adequate or accurate longitudinal and cross-country coverage. We then...

Early research has documented that the large scale equity market liberalizations of the last decade led the subsequent rise in aggregate equity indices, investment booms, capital flows and economic growth. An important and unaddressed issue is the normative question of whether and how these...

This paper evaluates the distributional impacts of transportation networks in China.We show that the quality of roads and railroads vary substantially over time andspace, and ignoring these variations biases the estimates of travel time. To account forquality differences, we construct a new...

Should central banks care about inequality? To address this question, we extend a standard model of time inconsistency in monetary policy to allow for heterogeneity. As in the standard analysis, lack of policy commitment leads to a bias towards socially excessive inflation. But the novel result...

This study investigates the effects of exports on income per capita using a panel data set of 150 countries from 1990 to 2012. We have found that exports have differing effects on income distribution depending on different phases of economic development. As exports (measured as the percent of...