We survey an emerging literature at the intersection of organizational economics and international trade. We argue that a proper modeling of the organizational aspects of production provides valuable insights on the aggregate workings of the world economy. In reviewing the literature, we...

This paper studies the way that word-of-mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents. We find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices, with less communication making this conformity more likely. Despite...

The nature and content of research and teaching in public economics have changed enormously during the past three decades. The field is more theoretically rigorous, more empirical, more focused on real policy issues, and more concerned with government spending as well as with taxation. For me,...

Productivity in the United States has been growing faster in the past seven years than it did in the previous quarter century. U.S. productivity growth accelerated while that in Europe declined. This paper asks why U.S. productivity growth has been faster than in the past and than in Europe. An...

Using the idea that firm-specific assets associated with marketing, management, and product-specific R & D can be used to service production plants in countries other than the country in which these inputs are employed, I develop a simple general equilibrium model of international trade in which...

No abstract provided.

We develop a model of common agency with complete information and general preferences with nontransferable utility, and we prove that the principals' Nash equilibrium in truthful strategies implements an efficient action. We apply this theory to the construction of a positive model of public...

This paper is an analytic comment on two chapters of the Economic Report of the President for 2006. Chapter One deals with the economy in 2005 and the outlook for the future. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the expansion in 2005 but not an explanation of why the expansion occurred...