We study the question of whether there exist strategies whereby countries are able to sustain a cartel or collusive behavior when bargaining with a bank over the amount of debt to be repaid. We show that despite the existence of economies to scale in bargaining--if commitment were possible the...

This paper presents intergenerational evidence in favor of the hypothesis that a significant factor explaining the increase in female labor force participation over time was the growing presence of men who grew up with a different family model--one in which their mother worked. We use...

This paper reviews the literature on culture and economics, focusing primarily on the epidemiological approach. The epidemiological approach studies the variation in outcomes across different immigrant groups residing in the same country. Immigrants presumably differ in their cultures but share...

The past decade has witnessed an explosion in the number of regional trade agreements. There seems to be a general, if ill-defined, belief on the part of many policymakers and academics that there is more to such agreements than the traditional gains from trade (thus the term"new regionalism")....

Using a model that distinguishes between large money center banks and smaller regional banks, this paper shows that the percentage of a country's debt held by the large banks affects the secondary market price of that country's debt: the higher the concentration of the debt, the higher the...

We study the effect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behavior of women 30-40 years old, born in the U.S., but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the...

This paper examines how preference heterogeneity affects the ability of the poor to extract resources from the rich. We study the equilibrium of a game in which coalitions of individuals form parties, parties propose platforms, and all individuals vote, with the winning policy chosen by...

Despite the well-known gains from trade, trade liberalization is politically one of the most contentious actions that a government can take. We propose and formalize a new argument, having to do with uncertainty, which is complementary to the usual explanations for why that is the case; many...

It has been shown that women married to men brought up by working mothers are significantly more likely to work than women married to men whose mothers were housewives. Furthermore, shocks to an economy which increase the number of working women (such as WWII), and thereby also increase the...