Why do some countries join the EU earlier than others, why do others wait? In order to answer this question we apply the theory of investment under uncertainty (Dixit and Pindyck, 1994) to the decision on EU-membership. We develop a simplified model of two periods to study how the value of...

Welfare gains from increasing product variety are an important source of the gains from international trade. Recent empirical studies have largely focused on measuring the gains from an increased variety of imports. Trade theory, however, suggests that international trade heavily affects the...

This paper examines the unprecedented decimation of sharks. We develop a Ricardian Gordon-Schaefer model with a continuum of heterogeneous species which are subject to combined harvesting and perfect substitutability in consumption. The model implies that slow-growing species, surviving in...

This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...

Standard international economic theory suggests that people should embrace economic integration because it promises large gains. But recent events such as Brexit indicate a desire for economic disintegration. Here we report results of an experiment, based on a strategic analytical framework, of...

This paper presents a new approach to estimate the green potential of occupations. Using data from O*NET on the skills that workers possess and the tasks they carry out, we train several machine learning algorithms to predict the green potential of U.S. occupations classified according to the...

Despite tremendous growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, the popular press has recently raised concerns that disruptive innovative activity is slowing. These dire prognoses were mainly driven by Park et al. (2023), a Nature publication that uses decades of data and...