Over the last decade there has been increasing international pressure on countries to raise 'social standards' (i.e. production standards based on environmental and labor conditions). Currently, the World Trade Organization does not allow countries to impose minimum standards on imports based on...

With the emergence of North-South intra-industry trade in products where consumers value quality, exporting countries potentially face significant barriers to entry. Due to the existence of asymmetric information about new products in a foreign market, the producer's reputation becomes an...

This paper analyzes how a country's commitment to labor standards is affected by the international political power they possess. Powerful countries may be less committed to actual enforcement of certain labor standards since they are unlikely to face significant threats of international...

This paper develops a theory of debt management in which government financing decisions have distributional consequences. We consider a constant aggregate endowment economy in which the government finances exogenous stochastic public spending needs with uniform lump sum taxes and...

This paper studies the role of education in women's changing role in the labor and marriage markets since the 1960's.

The global economic and financial instability context of the 1990s and 2000s also affected the Turkish economy. Actually, the 1980s in Turkey are characterized by a radical transformation of its economy through significant efforts of liberalization. With an out-looking economy and a liberalized...

The goal of this paper is to develop formal techniques for analyzing the relative in-sample performance of two competing, misspecified models in the presence of possible data instability. The central idea of our methodology is to propose a measure of the models' local relative performance: the...