Although the finance-growth relationship is now firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, we show that it is not as strong in more recent data as it was in the original studies with data for the period from 1960 to 1989. We consider several explanations. First, we find that the incidence of...

We show that, in the context of the market for a professional service, adverse selection problems can sufficiently exacerbate moral hazard considerations so that even though all agents are risk neutral, welfare can be reduced by allowing the agent to �buy the firm� from the principal....

This paper presents a new theory of trade policy-making based on the possibility of social conflict, and determines the conditions under which it will apply. In a setting where property rights are poorly enforced, the paper shows that the Stolper-Samuelson theorem embodies a set of sufficient...

Cloud computing brings together several existing technologies including service oriented architecture, distributed grid computing, virtualization, and broadband networking to provide software, infrastructure, and platforms as services. Under the old IT model, companies built their own server...

The Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires had a similar geographic distribution with outposts all around the Indian Ocean, which they controlled and manned. Both empires faced the same problem of monitoring their agents in remote corners of the world. Each, however, arrived at a different...

I study the real effects of bubbles in a price-settingenvironment. Bubbles cause price dispersion and overinvestment in assets that are overvalued. And when they pop some goods are not sold and capacity is not fully utilized. I argue that a government monopoly on the creation of bubble assets is...

This paper analyzes economic linkages between the exhaustion and protection of intellectual property. We consider a North-South model, where a firm that enjoys monopoly status in the North by virtue of an intellectual property right (IPR) -- such as a patent or a trademark -- has the incentive...

Existing empirical evidence suggests that the effects of Vietnam veteran status on earnings in the decade-and-a-half following service may be concentrated in the lower tail of the earnings distribution. Motivated by this evidence, we develop a formal statistical procedure which is specifically...

This chapter provides a survey of much of the recent theoretical analysis of products liability. We start by describing an idealized model and providing the specific economic assumptions which underpin it. Later sections examine the effects of relaxing these assumptions, which has been the focus...

This paper shows how, under threat of revolution, a nation's elite are able to maintain political stability and hence ownership of their wealth by creating or expanding a `pampered bureaucracy.' The elite thus divert part of an otherwise entrepreneurial middle class from more productive...