In a campaign spending contest model, this paper investigates whether the sources of incumbency advantage are able to generate the observed pattern of campaign spending and incumbent reelection rates in US elections and assesses the degree to which campaign ?nance reform can mitigate the...

This study challenges a central assumption of standard trade models: constant marginal cost technology. We present evidence consistent with the view that increasing marginal cost is present in the data, and further identify financial and physical capacity constraints as the main sources of...

I estimate the impact on population and employment for 52 different demographic groups of the recent in?ux of state omnibus immigration laws targeting undocumented immigrants in the United States. I ?nd evidence that while the demographic groups pinpointed as having higher percentages of...

A unique panel of retail prices spanning 123 cities in 79 countries from 1990 to 2005 is used to uncover the novel properties of long-run international price dispersion. At the PPP level, almost all of price dispersion is attributed to unskilled wage dispersion. At the level of individual goods...

Many developing countries display remarkably high degrees of urban concentration, incommensurate with their levels of urbanization. The cost of excessively high levels of urban concentration can be very high in terms of overpopulation, congestion, and productivity growth. One strand in the...

A research joint venture (RJV) faces a serious free-rider problem because its participants¡¯ contributions are mostly unobservable. We first present a model that shows that a RJV solves this problem by pre-committing to its termination date. Our analysis shows that there is an optimal...

This paper develops a model of a trade agreement that puts at centre stage the competing interests between ?rms within a sector: Larger ?rms tend to be pro-trade liberalization whereas smaller ?rms favor protection. This set-up contrasts with the prior literature in economics that has tended to...