There is a persistent tendency in economic development circles to jump to policy conclusions without entertaining more fundamental explanations of empirical patterns. After reviewing several examples in the field of agricultural development, I provide an alternative paradigm for understanding...

Building on the seminal work of Ginarte and Park (1997), we develop an index of property rights in pharmaceutical innovations, the Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Protection (PIPP) Index, for 154 countries spanning 1960 to 2005. It incorporates 5 types of property rights in pharmaceuticals;...

Large wage differences between countries ("place premiums") are well documented. Neoclassical trade theory suggests that factor price convergence should follow increased commercial integration. Rising commercial integration, foreign direct investment, and migration followed the 1994 North...

This report provides an update on the potential impact of marriage equality in Hawai'i on the state’s economy in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent DOMA and Proposition 8 decisions. We find that marriage equality is likely to lead to substantial increases in Hawai'i visitor...

This article recounts the early years of one of the most successful tourist destinations in the world, Hawaii, from about 1870 to 1940. Tourism began in Hawaii when faster and more predictable steamships replaced sailing vessels in trans-Pacific travel. Governments (international, national, and...

This paper examines a puzzle regarding public land privatization in New South Wales and the Province of Buenos Aires in the early nineteenth century. Both claimed frontier lands as public lands to raise revenue. New South Wales lost control of the public claim as squatters rushed out and claimed...

A number of studies have estimated how much energy conservation is achieved by providing households with real-time information on energy use via in-home displays. However, none of these studies tell us why real-time information changes energy-use behavior. We explore the causal mechanisms...

This paper uses a New Monetarist framework to study the trade of indivisible goods with divisible money in a frictional market. We first derive conditions under which stationary equilibrium exists, and then show that if equilibrium exits, it is unique. The uniqueness result is due to the...

This paper studies the welfare cost of inflation in a frictional monetary economy with endogenous price dispersion, which is generated by sellers posting prices and buyers costly searching for low prices. We identify three channels through which inflation affects welfare. The interaction of real...

Previous studies have argued that global value chains (GVCs) have increased the sensitivity of trade to external business cycle shocks. This may occur either because GVC trade is concentrated in durable goods industries, which are known to have high income elasticities (a composition effect), or...