Several of the recently negotiated regional trade agreements (Canada-U.S., NAFTA, E.C.-Hungary/Poland/Czeck and Slovak Republics) contain significantly fewer concessions by the large countries to smaller countries than vice versa. Yet, it is small countries that have sought them and see...

We explore the link between online salience and charitable donations. Using a unique dataset on phone text donations that includes detailed information on the timing of cash gifts to charities, we link donations to time variation in online searches for words that appear in those charities'...

We describe a model of trade with input based product differentiation and non-proportional trade costs that is capable of predicting a positive correlation between firms' export intensity, the price of their exports, and the wages they pay to their workers. These correlations arise in the model...

We study how domestic content requirements in Free Trade Areas (FTAs) affect market power and market structure in concentrated intermediate goods markets. We show that content requirements increase oligopolistic markups beyond the level that would obtain under an equivalent import tariff, and we...

We offer a new explanation for why taxes have become less progressive in many countries in parallel with an increase in income inequality. When performance-based compensation differentials are needed to incentivize effort, redistribution through progressive income taxes becomes less precisely...

We investigate the theoretical relationship between wage concentration and international market integration. Access to imported varieties lowers the cost of intermediate inputs (“machines”) used to carry out production tasks, causing workers with different comparative abilities to be sorted...

We examine why heterogenous communities may fail to provide public goods. Current work characterizes sanctioning free-riders as an under-supplied public good. We argue that often free-riders can be punished by the coordinated action of a group. This punishment can be profitable, and need not be...

We study contestability in non-profit markets when non-commercial providers supply a homogeneous collective good through increasing-returns-to-scale technologies. Unlike in the case of for-profit competition, in the non-profit case the absence of price-based sales contracts means that fixed...

Human societies of all kinds solve a problem of order. That is what differentiates them from sets of isolated individuals. The problem may be solved in various ways: in particular, some societies possess a state which provides order, while others are stateless. However, the existence of a state...