This paper provides a rough test of a broad and prominent class of political economy of trade models and finds them wanting. The class features governments with weighted social welfare functions, including the prominent model of Grossman and Helpman. Whether the government is the single domestic...

This paper analyzes the economic foundations of a non-democratic political regime, where the ruling bureaucracy captures rents through collective control over state property and job assignment. The model developed here yields the equilibrium in the 'political labor market,' where the ruling...

A central feature of many models of location choice -- whether of firms or households, within or across cities -- is the role of local interactions or spillovers, whereby the payoffs from choosing a location depend in part on the number or attributes of other individuals or firms that choose the...

With the growing recognition of the role played by geography in all sorts of economic problems, there is strong interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers (i.e., simple anonymous agglomeration or congestion effects, or more complicated interactions between individuals or firms...

It has become increasingly common to allocate highway franchises to the bidder that offers to charge the lowest toll. Often, building a highway increases the value of land held by a small group of developers, an effect that is more pronounced with lower tolls. We study the welfare implications...

In most instances, the dynamic response of monetary and other policies to shocks is infrequent and lumpy. The same holds for the microeconomic response of some of the most important economic variables, such as investment, labor demand, and prices. We show that the standard practice of estimating...

This paper builds a general test of contagion in financial markets based on bivariate correlation analysis - a test that can be interpreted as an extension of the normal correlation theorem. Contagion is defined as a structural break in the data generating process of rates of return. Using a...

This paper examines the political economy of coordination in a simple two-sector model in which individuals' choice of agricultural technology affects industrialization. We demonstrate the existence of multiple equilibria; the economy is either characterized by the use of a traditional...