We examine how trade liberalization afects South’s incentive to protect intellectual property rights (IPR) in a North-South duopoly model where a low-cost North firm competes with a high-cost South firm in the South market. The extent of effective cost difference between North and South...

When siblings are concerned for the well-being of their elderly parents, the costs of caregiving and long-term commitment create a free-rider problem. If siblings living near their parents can share the costs, this positive externality exacerbates the under-provision of proximate living....

We investigate the effects of government spending on U.S. economic activity using a threshold version of a structural vector autoregressive model. Our empirical findings support state-dependent effects of fiscal policy. In particular, the effects of a government spending shock on output are...

This paper sheds new light on forces shaping the outsourcing decision by linking the decision to a certain form of non-linearity in overhead costs which divides a firm’s operation into small and large regimes. Marginal firms that find evolution into a large business too costly outsource in a...

We propose the use of likelihood-based confidence sets for the timing of structural breaks in parameters from time series regression models. The confidence sets are valid for the broad setting of a system of multivariate linear regression equations under fairly general assumptions about the...

We design an experiment to examine the causal effect of legal institutional quality on informal norms of cooperation, and study the interaction of institutions and culture in sustaining economic exchange. 346 subjects in Italy and Kosovo play a market game under different and randomly allocated...

We study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies...

This study examines changes in returns to formal education and cognitive skills over the last 20 years using the 1979 and 1997 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We show that cognitive skills had a 30%-50% larger effect on wages in the 1980s than in the 2000s. Returns to...

In this paper, we reproduce Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments using his data, and then replicate it using our own data. We find that Engel’s (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments is quite robust. We show that meta-analyses of dictator game experiments depend to...

The Traverse refers to the movement of the economy outside equilibrium. It requires a consideration of how an economy may achieve equilibrium, and how it may navigate towards a new one if conditions change. Analysis of these themes, from the classical economists onwards, leads to the conclusion...