Evaluating Recipes for Development Success Avinash Dixit This article offers a provocative critique of the ability of research on the impact of institutions on growth to offer immediate and practical recommendations for reforming and redesigning institutions in developing countries and...

This paper provides a review of the contradictions and conflicts in the literature on economic governance and sketches an approach to use some of the conceptual and empirical findings from that literature for development policy. The literature offers conflicting conclusions on big questions:...

We develop continuous-time models of capacity choice when demand fluctuates stochastically, and the firm's opportunities to expand or contract are limited. Specifically consider costs of investing or disinvesting that vary with time, or with the amount of capacity already installed. The firm's...

Capital investment decisions must recognize the limitations on the firm's ability later to sell off or expand capacity. This paper shows how opportunities for future expansion or contraction can be valued as options, how this valuation relates to the q-theory of investment, and how these options...

In this paper we ask whether a policy of targeted export promotion can raise domestic welfare when several oligopolistic industries all draw on the same scarce factor of production. Our point of departure is one of Cournot duopoly in which a single home firm competes with a single foreign firm...

This paper analyzes trade in manufactured goods that are produced via a vertical production structure with many stages, where some value is added at each to an intermediate product to yield a good-in-process ready for the next stage. We consider the stage at which a good is traded to be an...

This paper analyses optimal irreversible investment policy when profits are subject to a multiplicative geometric Brownian motion shock. The marginal product of capital is increasing initially and decreasing thereafter. In the latter range, optimal policy is familiar: capacity is added gradually...

We re-examine the basic investment problem of deciding when to incur a sunk cost to obtain a stochastically fluctuating benefit. The optimal investment rule satisfies a trade-off between a larger versus a later net benefit; we show that this trade-off is closely analogous to the standard...

Capital investment decisions must recognize the limitations on the firm's ability later to sell off or expand capacity. This paper shows how opportunities for future expansion or contraction can be valued as options, how this valuation relates to the q-theory of investment, and how these options...