The author demonstrates that sustained inflation is a predictable response to price liberalization in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The author models the phenomenon in a dynamic macroeconomic framework,and demonstrates the immediate price jump followed by sustained inflation that has...

The authors analyze the possibility of tradeoffs between efficiency and equity as well as the possibility of distributional conflicts in the context of renegotiation of infrastructure contracts in developing countries. To do so, they present a model in which contracts are awarded by auctioning...

The author examines the efficiency and equity of a market allocation of exhaustible resources and assesses the behavior of scarcity measures, such as relative price and rental rates. She finds little evidence of scarcity or impending shortage. Indeed, the evidence points to falling prices and...

The authors examine the degree to which international cotton prices are linked and test whether such links have improved over the past decade. They conclude that the degree of linkage has improved over the past decade, in the short run largely as the result of short-run price transmission -- and...

Despite its importance to economic growth and the evolution of market structure, the investment behavior of firms, industries, and countries remains poorly understood. This paper has several objectives. First, it reviews some basic models of irreversible investment to illustrate the option-like...

Perestroyka, introduced in the Soviet Union to reform the economy after the"period of stagnation"under Brezhnev, involves combining centralized planning with elements of a market economy. For it to succeed, certain micro and macro conditions need to be fulfilled. As far as micro conditions are...

The authors explore the effects on the terms of trade of regional economic integration. They show why it is an appropriate measure of the welfare effects of such integration, comparing it with the many ex post studies that base their conclusions on changes in the import shares of member and...

Drawing on evidence about industrial organization and market structure, the authors develop a computable general equilibrium model in selected industrial sectors with increasing returns to scale. They use this model to estimate the welfare gains Korea would realize from abolishing the import...

A cornerstone of the auction literature is the theory of"optimal auctions."'This theory uses mechanism design techniques to characterize, in general settings, the auction that maximizes the seller's expected revenues. One feature of the solution is that typically there is a conflict between the...

To study the effects of tariffs on gross domestic product (GDP), one needs import demand elasticities at the tariff line level that are consistent with GDP maximization. These do not exist. The authors modify Kohli's (1991) GDP function approach to estimate demand elasticities for 4,625 imported...