Over the period of 1995-2005 an increasing number of differentiated products have been exported from developing countries, and much of the growth in world trade at the extensive margin has come from these countries. Leading examples of this type of trade expansion, both in terms of products and...

I develop a novel model of group-based deliberation in which communication is costly in two directions: agents must pay separate costs to send and to receive messages. Equilibrium strategies have an intuitive characterization - those with the best information send, those with the worst...

We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences. Rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions. If voting is compulsory, then voters may find it rational to vote...

We report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the extent to which individuals can solve a deterministic, intertemporal lifecycle consumption optimization problem. The environment we study has a positive interest rate on savings and no discounting implying that the optimal consumption...

We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting mechanisms. Theory predicts that these different mechanisms have different implications both for the sincerity of the voting decisions and for the participation decisions of voters, and we find strong support for these...

This paper examines the effect of banking on economic growth in modern Russia. To overcome simultaneity and selection, we exploit regional banking variation induced by the creation of “specialized banks†in the last years of the Soviet Union (1988-1991). Consistent with the qualitative...

This paper examines the e¤ects of trade frictions, including tari¤s and a variety of factors that raise trade costs, on export market access at the product level and, in particular, the role these frictions have on the ability of developing countries to access world markets. We …nd...

. . .

We examine the expectational stability (E--stability) of rational expectations equilibrium in the ``New Keynesian\'\' model where monetary policy is optimally derived and interest rate stabilization is added to the central bank\'s traditional objectives of inflation and output stabilization. We...