Ricardian theories of production often take the comparative advantage of locations in different industries to be uncorrelated. They are seen as the outcome of the realization of a random extreme value distribution. These theories do not take a stance regarding the counterfactual or implied...

This paper, written for a World Trade Organization compendium, investigates the possibilities open to developing nations for controlling the abuse of intellectual property rights, and in particular patents, under Articles 31 and 40 of the Uruguay Round TRIPS (trade-related aspects of...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) balances risks and benefits before approving pharmaceuticals, as rationality would require. But powerful behavioral biases that lead to the mishandling of uncertainty also influence its approval process. The FDA places inordinate emphasis on errors of...

Economic theory teaches us that it is in every country's own best interest to engage in trade. Trade therefore is a voluntary activity among consenting parties. On this view, considerations of justice have little bearing on trade, and political philosophers concerned with matters of global...

The last ten years have seen the growth of linkages between many of the world's cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gases (GHGs), both directly between systems, and indirectly via connections to credit systems such as the Clean Development Mechanism. If nations have tried to act in their own...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different...

We provide evidence that economic circumstances are a key intermediating variable for understanding the relationship between schooling and political protest. Using the World Values Survey, we find that individuals with higher levels of schooling, but whose income outcomes fall short of that...

The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of...