This note considers the extension of the Kemp-Wan theorem on necessarily welfare-improving customs unions to free trade areas. It suggests that the value of this extension is undermined by its very rationale - the greater popularity of free trade areas over customs unions for 'political' reasons.

While two different streams of literature exist investigating 1) the relationship between oil prices and emerging market stock prices and 2) oil prices and exchange rates, relatively little is known about the relationship between oil prices, exchange rates and emerging stock markets. This paper...

Using a new monthly time-series data set, we explore the factors associated with variations in the number of civilians killed or wounded by participants in the civil war in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that an increase in the level of abuse by one side is strongly associated with...

One of the eight Millennium Development Goals is to 'promote gender equality and empower women.' However, only 1% of official foreign aid is currently spent on gender equality and human rights. Using individual-level survey data from 39 villages in northern Senegal, we model the effects that...

There is now a large empirical literature on the effect of the aggregate inflation rate on (i) the dispersion of prices across goods or locations (relative price variability, or RPV) and (ii) the dispersion of inflation rates across goods or locations (relative inflation variability, or RIV). In...

Uncovering gradients is of crucial importance across a broad range of economic environments. Here we consider data-driven bandwidth selection based on the gradient of an unknown regression function. The procedure developed here is automatic and does not require initial estimation of unknown...

We present results from an experiment with multiple public goods, where each good produces benefits only if total contributions to it reach a minimum threshold. The experiment allows us to compare contributions in a benchmark treatment with a single public good and in treatments with more public...

We address a dynamic general equilibrium model where securities are backed by collateralized loans, and borrowers face endogenous liquidity contractions and financial participation constraints. Although the only payment enforcement is the seizure of collateral guarantees, restrictions on credit...

Using personnel data from a large U.S. retail firm, I examine the firm’s response to the 1996 federal minimum wage increase. Compulsory increases in average wages had negative but statistically insignificant effects on overall employment. However, increases in the relative wages of teenagers...

The average quality of spouse an individual marries varies significantly with age at marriage, peaking in the mid-twenties, then declining through the mid-forties, as does the hazard rate of marriage. Using a non-stationary sequential search model, we identify the search frictions that generate...