This paper is a contribution to the literature on rational design of trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an incomplete contract among sovereign states. Incomplete contracts contain gaps. Ex post, contractual gaps may leave gains from trade unrealized; they may create 'regret'...

Geographical Indications (GIs) for products (Basmati rice, Champagne sparkling wine, Antigua coffee, etc.) were regulated at the international level in 1995 (WTO TRIPS Agreement, Part II, Section 3). This paper proposes a model on the welfare effects of the socalled claw-back of GIs; i.e. the...

We analyse the impact of relaxing rules of origin (ROOs) in a simple setting with heterogeneous firms that buy intermediate inputs from domestic and foreign sources. In particular, we consider the impact of switching from bilateral to diagonal cumulation when using preferences (instead of paying...

This paper discusses fiscal policy using a DSGE model with search and matching in the labour market. Fiscal policy is effective mainly via its impact through the labour market. Although public intervention tends to crowd out private consumption, public spending also improves the matching between...

This paper is a simple extension of the standard FDI model of Markusen and Horstmann (1992). This latter predicts firms would supply nearby markets with exports but far away markets with FDI. Nevertheless, this does not match the spatial pattern in the data for many home nations and industries....

In a two-country portfolio model with leverage constraints, I focus on private assets in order to understand how their behaviour can justify an expected excess return as well as the flight-to-safety observed in the data. The specific goal is to study how much these phenomena are explained by the...

If women make different economic decisions than men on average, then an increase in women's influence in the political and economic spheres of society might change economic outcomes. In this note, we focus on the impact of female enfranchisement on fiscal policy outcomes. We present a simple...

The Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset...

We study the incidence of offshoring, or trade in tasks, on firms' productivity and on manufacturing employment in a standard economic-geography model with iceberg trade costs and a continuum of tasks. In a two-countries world where one country has a Hick's neutral technological edge over the...

Offshoring has gained a significant momentum in recent years. Firm size appears to be the leading factor differentiating firms that offshore from those that do not. We present a model that blends offshoring, or trade in tasks, with a Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with...