Caspar Hare ["Rationality and the Distant Needy," Philosophy & Public Affairs 35 (2007): 161-78] has offered two distinct, but related, arguments whose purpose is to show that anyone in a position to help someone in great need at little personal cost who is minimally decent must violate one or...

We develop a general equilibrium macroeconomic model with endogenous health accumulation, and we use the model's equilibrium condition to estimate the elasticity of substitution between medical care and leisure time in maintaining health, based on a cross-country panel dataset. Our econometric...

Motivated by existing multilateral rules regarding intellectual property, we develop a North-South model to highlight the dual roles price controls and compulsory licensing play in determining Southern access to a patented Northern product. The Northern patent-holder chooses whether and how to...

The Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, as well as the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995 and the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, resulted in disorderly movements of yen in the foreign exchange market. This paper investigates the exchange rate volatility shift after these three great...

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inter-continental trade brought with it a novel form of organizing business: the multinational firm. Headquartered in Europe and operating in Asia, the success of the East India Companies depended largely on the management of overseas outposts, as well...

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of regional exhaustion of intellectual property, a policy regime under which a set of countries permit parallel imports from one another but not from the rest of the world. A three-country model is developed in which two high-income countries...

We study the research productivity of new graduates of top Ph.D. programs in economics. We find that class rank is as important as departmental rank in predicting future research productivity. For example the best graduate from UIUC or Toronto in a given year will have roughly the same number of...

Is political unity a necessary condition for a successful monetary union? The early United States seems a leading example of this principle. But the view is misleadingly simple. I review the historical record and uncover signs that the United States did not achieve a stable monetary union, at...

In this paper we investigate the nature of rational expectations equilibria for economic epidemiological models. Unlike mathematical epidemiological models, economic epidemiological models can produce regions of indeterminacy or instability around the endemic steady states. We consider SI, SIS,...

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality...