The standard deviations of capital flows to emerging countries are 80 percent higher than those to developed countries. First, we show that very little of this difference can be explained by more volatile fundamentals or by higher sensitivity to fundamentals. Second, we show that most of the...

Estimates for the U.S. suggest that at least in some sectors productivity enhancing reallocation is the dominant factor in accounting for productivity growth . An open question, particularly relevant for developing countries, is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. It may be...

Although global free trade is efficient, each country's benefit from free trade depends on the path that leads to the global free trade agreement. Using a dynamic model of trading bloc formation, we how that when global free trade is reached gradually, the countries that are initially excluded...

We study the earning structure and the equilibrium assignment of workers to firms in a model in which workers have social preferences and skills are perfectly substitutable in production. We allow firms to offer long terms contracts and for frictions in the labour market in the form of mobility...

This paper examines competition in a spatial model of two-candidate elections, where one candidate enjoys a quality advantage over the other candidate. The candidates care about winning and also have policy preferences. There is two-dimensional private information. Candidate ideal points as well...

In some markets, such as the market for drugs or for financial services, sellers have better information than buyers regarding the matching between the buyer's needs and the good's actual characteristics. Depending on the market structure, this may lead to conflicts of interest and/or the...

We propose a stylized model of a problem-solving organization whose internal communication structure is given by a fixed network. Problems arrive randomly anywhere in this network and must find their way to their respective "specialized solvers" by relying on local information alone. The...

We find that international trade has an economically significant and statistically robust positive effect on productivity. Our trade measure is imports plus exports relative to purchasing power parity GDP (real openness), which we argue is preferable on theoretical grounds to the nominal measure...

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the...