Cultural allegiances whether inherited, imposed or chosen, affect economic activity. Many of these cultural layers – ethnic background, religion, language, ideological orientation, and artistic interests – spill over national boundaries. Cultural ideas travel the world along many routes from...

We analyze policy options during an international health emergency to provide consumers in least developed countries access to patented life-extending pharmaceuticals. We show that a properly specified tariff against reexports achieves optimal price dispersion and is shown to depend on the...

We analyze policy options during an international health emergency to provide consumers in least developed countries access to patented life-extending pharmaceuticals. We show that a properly specified tariff against re?xports achieves optimal price dispersion and is shown to depend on the...

We analyze policy options during an international health emergency to provide consumers in least developed countries access to patented life-extending pharmaceuticals. Reliance on property rights exhaustion is shown to be insufficiently flexible and costly to implement. By contrast, the optimal...

This chapter surveys the literature on international trade and the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the global economy. The discussion is organized around the major questions in the field. How does openness to trade affect national incentives for patent protection? What is...

We analyze whether financial compensation is preferable to the current system of dispute settlement in the World Trade Organization that permits member countries to impose retaliatory tariffs in response to trade violations committed by other members. We show that monetary fines are more...

The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i) increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and (iii) decrease with the variance of imports. We find US import policy during...

We explore the impact of multilateral liberalization, with emphasison distributional effects across countries. We first develop a realistic base1ine that takes into account events such as the entry of China into the WTO and the enlargement of the EU, allowing us to focus on those effects that...

WTO negotiations deal predominantly with bound - besides applied - tariff rates. But, how can reductions in tariffs ceilings, i.e. tariff rates that no exporter may ever actually be confronted with, generate market access? The answer to this question relates to the effects of tariff bindings on...

What do state-owned enterprises (SOEs) do? How do they respond to market incentives? Can we expect substantial efficiency gains from trade liberalization in economies with a strong presence of SOEs? Using a new dataset of Vietnamese firms we document a set of empirical regularities...