The few existing empirical studies of U.S.-Japan trade agreements have relied primarily on descriptive statistics or univariate time series methods. We conduct a more powerful test by evaluating agreements in the context of well-specified econometric models. Consistent with trade theory, import...

This essay explores the nature, causes, and consequences of corruption as it pertains to entire regimes. Grand corruption is modeled as a type of unproductive rent-seeking at the highest levels of government. The economic costs of corruption are assumed to increase in the decentralization (and...

Out analysis focuses on the effect of U.S. government pressure on Korea to adopt product patents for chemical and pharmaceutical products. American pressure began in November 1985 and ended with the Korean Legislature's passage of a new patent law in December 1986. We conduct an event study of...

The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 set aside marginal lands for Native Hawaiian homesteads with restrictions on their alienability and use, and funds for their development. The Act preserved all leased government sugar lands for the plantations, and preserved homesteads and federal...

Competitive equilibria are shown to exist in two-object exchange economies with indivisibilities and additive complementarities in agent valuations between objects, provided that complementarities are common across agents. We further investigate whether the competitive equilibrium can be...

We exploit advances in panel data econometrics to test whether real interest parity holds in the Pacific Basin region. We test for a unit root in the difference between either the US, Japanese or Euro area real interest rate and the real interest rates from a panel of eleven Pacific Basin...

South Korea became a net-provider of foreign direct investment in the late 1980s, and is now emerging as a major source of foreign direct investment in ASEAN and China. In general, the economic gains that the host country realizes from foreign direct investment are not a factor that the home...

In this paper we consider an overlapping gnerations model with endogenous fertility and two-sided altruism and show the limitations of applying commonly used open loop Nash equilibrium in characterizing equilibrium transfers from parents to children in the form of bequest, and transfers from...

Several authors have argued that the second-best environmental tax on a “dirty good” is less than marginal emission damage associated with its consumption. These studies limit their analysis to cases in which emissions can only be reduced by a reduction of the dirty good. With a more general...

We investigate the impact of exogenous income fluctuations on health using twenty years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. To unravel the impact of income on health from unobserved heterogeneity and reverse causality, we employ techniques from the literature on the estimation of...