In this paper we use a signaling model to analyze the effect of (endogenously-determined) third-party non-recourse loans to plaintiffs on settlement bargaining when a plaintiff has private information about the value of her suit. We show that an optimal loan (i.e., one that maximizes the joint...

Developing countries now account for a significant fraction of world trade and two thirds of the membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, many are still individually small and thus have a limited ability to bilaterally extract and enforce trade concessions from larger developed...

I use a flexible price version of the Prescott (1975) hotels model to explain variations in price dispersion across goods sold by supermarkets in Chicago. The main finding is that price dispersion measures are positively correlated with proxies for demand uncertainty. I also find that price...

We evaluate the case for non-discrimination in the international protection of intellectual property. If trade is not subject to any frictions then requiring national treatment (NT) in patent protection does not have any consequences for innovation (and welfare) since unfavorable discrimination...

Empirical evidence suggests that both leisure time and medical care are important for maintaining health. We develop a general equilibrium macroeconomic model in which taxation is a key determinant of the composition of these two inputs in the endogenous accumulation of health capital. In our...

This letter calls attention a recent trend in economics publishing that seems to have slipped under the radar: large increases in submissions rates across a wide range of economics journals and steeply declining acceptance rates as a consequence. It is argued that this is bad for scholarly...

The ``Federalist financial revolution'' may have jump-started the U.S. economy into modern growth, but the Free Banking System (1837-1862) did not play a direct role in sustaining it. Despite lowering entry barriers and extending banking into developing regions, we find in county-level data that...

I examine the implementation of the Friedman rule under the assumption that age dependent lump sum transfers are possible and private intermediation is costly. This is done both in an infinitely lived agents model and in an overlapping generations model. I argue that in addition to a zero...

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...

We develop a North-South model in which a firm that enjoys monopoly status in the North (by virtue of a patent or a trademark) has the incentive to price discriminate internationally because Northern consumers value its product more than Southern ones. While North's policy regarding the...